


Still Life/Rear View

by thebarstool



Category: Death Note
Genre: Drug Use, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hallucinations, Insomnia, M/M, Mental Illness, Mentions of non-con, antagonist-in-mourning, garbage bag of every lawlight cliche known to man, sad trash, terrible terrible people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-06
Updated: 2015-07-06
Packaged: 2018-04-07 22:06:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4279638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebarstool/pseuds/thebarstool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It’s possible to hold two opposing ideas in your head but how much do you suffer daily?"</p><p>It's 3 am and Light is getting this grief-stricken psychosis show on the road.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Life/Rear View

**Author's Note:**

> I can't even explain myself. Playlist is [here](http://8tracks.com/thebarstool/with-him-dead-in-the-ground-the-world-turns-without-me)

[I won’t be fooled by it’s touch or emotional supply  
The scent of the fair and heavy allure will dry]

“Sever”- iamamiwhoami

 

Still Life/Rear View 

 

Long immune to mortal failures, the mechanics of gravity do not occur to him. 

Nothing external quite penetrates this skin, not warmth, not touch.

Or so it says in the scripture he wrote and lives by. 

The reality is an unwelcome subversion.

\-------------------------

It doesn’t occur to Light that he's capable of feeling much of anything until he’s staring blankly at the television in the break room waiting for yet another pot of coffee. They’ve abandoned the French press and its meticulous paraphernalia because there’s no one who cares enough about the flavor to justify the trouble and the process itself is fraught with memories of dead men and failure. For most of them, anyway. Light doesn’t care. He can’t taste anything. It’s just a chemical that keeps him awake.

He alternates between the garble of the television and the warped miniature version of his own reflection in the curved glass of the coffee pot, the dark portions of the TV image. Someone has changed the channel to one of those documentaries about freak accidents in which an idiot almost dies, loses a limb. Light hears it only as surface stimuli. He isn’t paying attention. He is tuned into and impatient about the coffee. He doesn’t care about inspiration porn. It doesn’t concern him or inspire him, no carpe diem. He is already a one man battle cry. Kira. Revolution.

Or so the internet says.

The subject of the documentary is a long-haired, disheveled man with round features and patchy facial hair who loses his arm after an accident while on the Appalachian Trail.

“I was losing all this blood,” he says, eyes wide, earnest, still shocked and Light’s lips curl. “But I didn’t feel the pain. Not until after. I didn’t know anything was gone until later.”

The coffee machine beeps. Light stares, grasping at the gray marble of the countertop.

He supposes that’s how he’d describe the after:

He didn’t feel it until later.

After he was gone.

Things get surreal at night with no one else around to force him into a coherent objective.

Light knows who he is by the people around him.

With his father, he is perfect and purposeful. With others, he reflects everything they have always wanted to be but weren’t talented enough to realize for themselves. Their hopes and dreams reflected back onto them whether fondly or bitterly.

At night, he is with himself and occasionally, it is quiet.

Light centers himself on a very thin skein of what he believes are his most stable and consistent traits.

Solitude preserves.

Solitude is the wire mesh that holds the external demands/semi-realities and partial lies of what Light Yagami might be.

And yet, after months of eyes everywhere, surveillance, the prodding mistrust, walking on tenterhooks, half-blind, confused, solitude is now his bane.

The thing he is fighting now is a rudderless sort of despair that he cannot quite name as despair because the plan has come to fruition against all odds. Every move was made just as if he had written the future himself. It’s such a heady feeling to know that everything happened just as he foresaw it. He is the best player, right now the only player and that should be entirely satisfying.

This is what he wanted.

Victory.

Solitude.

 

“I need you to leave me alone for at least five minutes.” Light’s voice warbles out of his constricted esophagus. The scene hazes into the gauzy light of a bedroom. He glares down at his own clenched fists, the only thing real, unable to gather enough control to look over at his albatross.

“I’m afraid not. Five minutes is enough time for something...nefarious, in my experience anyway.”

Questions arise in a portion of Light’s mind of when and who and what he is talking about but they are secondary to his rage. The tremors in Light’s hands are in the periphery of his awareness. He can hear his own blood struggle to pump through pulsing, taxed arteries.

“If I were to kill you,” Light breathes, only dimly cognoscente of what he’s saying through the sleep deprivation, the stiffness in his limbs, the resentment/rage that chokes him constantly.

L stares, the flat edge of his thumb on his lips, eyes wide. Waiting.

“I’d take my time,” Light finishes, moving his head down to struggle for control under the cover of his own, still overgrown hair.

“Is this a confession,” L asks, hopefully, after a moment.

Light bites his lips, bubbles of hysteria roiling inside his body, accumulating to expand his diaphragm. After this, he was better at keeping his cool because something in him commanded him to. He couldn’t have the security of a moment with himself, he would have to make do. Light was very good at adapting to the scarcity of the moment. This was all he had, he needed to regain his equilibrium in the environment provided and he would do so. But first, he needs to draw blood from this grubby, pale stone.

He punches L in the face. 

 

Well, he punched L in the face.

Light’s eyes focus on his path along the dim hallway as he walks, the heat radiating from the coffee in his hand, jostling against the porcelain.

Associations: the brain creates a network of them in daily life and time is rarely linear.

He is here in Investigation headquarters, partially shuttered monument to two dead men and their failure, snapshot of his own victory and he is there, embittered and exhausted, mental process hazed by something he doesn’t understand, might be mind control. He is there, in what is now the past, an enraged puppet of a plan bigger than them all, with L, his Interpol sanctioned jailer/monster and he is both empty and full of that echo of pure, unchecked loathing.

Light is arrested in multiple currents. He knows the way. It’s just his legs are bit numb.

Here, in HQ, the present, Light enters the main room to the raised heads of the remainder of the team, now positioned solidly behind him, united in a respect that is not one fraction of how grudging it was for the one who built this waste of a building. L. They disliked him, never rid themselves of their disappointment but they respected him. Light, they look at him and they draw strength from his relentless determination. They admire him. Worship him, if he’s allows himself to succumb to the god shit for a little bit.

He hasn’t slept. He is running solely on coffee and sugar-free energy drinks from the storage closet. The mirror reveals amorphous darkness under his eyes and he gets a glimpse of what he might look like as a corpse: wasted, beautiful, sad tragic, weight loss. It’s intentional--part of his costume for the character of grief-stricken friend of ambiguous emotional tie and co-worker. Heir to the chaotic fight against evil, still unresolved.

Light proper, the core version is incompatible with all actual known human emotions, immune to such viruses and must run other systems in order to project a vision of himself in mourning.

Himself in mourning: ill-looking, pale. Light-in-mourning stares into space, dreams incessantly, remembers only shards of them, restlessly continues on.

He enters the room and they stare and a splinter of irritation floats to the surface of his tired calm. Their eyes are necessary to the facade, they keep him coherent. He looks back, he tells them they’re doing good, necessary work even when they aren’t.

It’s all pointless. He wrote this story. He knows the ending even when the other players don’t.

His father watches every loaded moment unfold in a silence that unsettles Light, mainly because Light isn’t sure he’s buying it.

Paranoia, a subsidiary of his insomnia, is a constant demon over his shoulder.

 

\-----------------------------------

They will never return here.

Instead, they will move to Light’s new apartment near his college campus where he can both earn his degree like a normal boy and be their surrogate L/beacon in the fight against Kira. It’s a practical decision.

Except Matsuda’s face betrays hesitation. Light prompts him for his unease. Wants to make an example of him, staple him to a tree for daring to question him even in his mind.

“It feels wrong somehow,” he says, nervous, always when coming up against Light, whom he worships more intensely than he ever did now that he’s seen Light’s performance of swallowed pain at L’s death, his humanity and continued resolve even in weakness. As always, he disgusts Light. Yet another person who bolsters the illusion that obscures the identity of Kira entirely. Irrational, he knows, to hate them for falling for the lie so easily but he’s always been demanding in his standards until there is no one who meets them because he wanted it that way.

Matsuda scratches at the back of his head, as he always does when he’s vaguely embarrassed.

“It’s like we’re...I don’t know, leaving them behind?”

The question mark at the end, along with the general idiocy of the complaint enrages Light.

“They’re dead,’” Light says, flatly. He’s unable to hold back the iron in his voice and Matsuda and the others startle. Light’s hands shake as he dribbles a bit of regret/sadness into his facial expression, clears his throat as if overcome.

His father enters on cue at Light’s falsified vulnerability like a mild spirit to avenge him.

“Unfortunately, this building is expensive and unnecessary.”

Light cannot smirk but he remembers L evading the simple explanation of the building as a petty show of might against an increasingly chaotic, unknown outcome. Against the inevitable defeat. He enjoys it now. He couldn’t then but he knew L was blanking him, not ashamed, but unable to admit to such a male, human weakness. A show of desperate might in ostentation. Vanity, thy name is L. Light keeps his face tired and calm but inside he is railing.

“Ryuuzaki would have understood,” is the tail end of what his father says and the others fall in line because Yagami Souichirou is a man of honor and reason and dedication unparalleled and even if they sense some sort of emotional compromise in Light (laugh laugh laugh) that is pushing him to vacate the building, they respect his father too much to question any further.

They fall in line.

It should satisfy Light but it doesn’t. He swallows back bile, nods at them to get back to work. They have a week.

Light knows he can’t be here longer than a week. Call it intuition that guides him beneath the ruthless rationality, the consolidated center of the empathetic connection natural to him like breathing, half-severed and re-routed so as to keep him alive and intact. He’s always felt shifts in wavelengths, unexplained, the closest to a psychic power anyone could come most likely and it’s served him well. It tells him when to run and now it laps at his spine, the tips of his fingers, a sense of dread and restlessness.

Guilt?

No.

Fear?

No.

Regret?

No. Not easily dissected into individual emotions. 

It’s all an unspecified complex wave he can’t pull apart, doesn’t care to understand. He’s taking the instinct’s direction without questioning it.

It tells him to go.

\----------------------------------

It’s 3AM.

The time slot of ghosts and regrets and every minute sound or visual cue that prompts other deviations from his simple, rote task: transfer necessary data from the servers, dismantle all equipment, salt the earth.

A challenge but not quite to the level of the man himself who moved faster and colder than any machine Light has ever encountered. The nemesis designed it himself and it displays an unsettling echo of the icy mischief that tinged everything L ever said or did.

But it submits, ultimately to Light’s hall of mirrors mind, like the real one did and eventually, like everything else, it will clear to a smooth runway for Light to ascend from.

The room is shuttered screens save for the focal point of Light’s bank of three screens crawling with the cascade of the system’s innards.

He enters an easy rhythm of deleting and saving, setting aside his vacillating feelings of curiosity and disappointment. The task requires concentration, a blank sort, not navel gazing. And Light is well used to entering that trance of non-feeling. Or used to be.

Perhaps he’s gotten used to the added complication of having to block an overgrown child and now his mind bucks at him for want of stimuli. It’s quiet but for the sounds of his hands against the keys and the whir/hum of the cooling fans. A slight change in acoustics from the climate control. An itemized list of common ambient noises in his mind, he knows this room, he’s spent so much time here.

The floor is an opaque, black marble, amplifies every movement. It registers a thin, plastic rattle.

Light stops typing, pauses in breathing, neutralizes all other sounds but the ambient background. 

He keeps his eyes on the blinking white cursor, calculating the probability that there is someone else here.

To call a name, that fraction of insecurity is something he won’t allow himself.

“Stubborn.”

Light’s head moves to the sound, sounds before he can reign in the impulse. He stares for a minute. Turns back to his screen. Blinking white cursor.

Tricks of an old neural pathway. Echoes of sounds and movements that have been processed before but not entirely banished.

Light doesn’t breathe.

He turns again, back at his screen, bites his chapping lips, closes his eyes. Concentrates on the floating spots beneath his own eyelids, a trick.

He opens his eyes again, turns again. The chair. Turns his gaze somewhere back to the vicinity of his lap, turns back, fists clenched, his expression flat once again, thanks to the faint taste of blood in his mouth from where he’s bitten into his cheek too abruptly, furious and terrified that he feels anything at all.

Light looks back at the ergonomic chair, spinning idly with a person in it this time, spinning around, one long, bare toe tracing half-completed arcs lifting too fast, albeit gracefully, before it can complete the circle. The effect is menacing. Most likely intentional, considering who it is.

“You’re not real,” Light says, flatly. The thing has eyes which Light doesn’t meet, outwardly, out of disdain, inwardly due to an unacknowledged cowardice. It’s a facsimile of the real thing, blurred at the edges like a poorly focused photograph.

“That’s quite rude, Light-kun.” The voice is a proper reconstruction. Light has resentful grafts of it in his mind from 50 days locked with just that voice in his head. It’s a figment of memory. The mouth, it has a mouth, curves as if it hears this thought cross Light’s mind but decides to bulldoze past it. “I suppose the fact that you did murder me indicates that we are beyond insincere courtesies.”

“You are not real,” Light repeats. this time his voice is pressed, as if food has gone down wrong. His temples throb. Perhaps it all ends with a hallucination and a brain hemorrhage.

“Define real,” L demands. His voice is sharp through the ambient light of screens in sleep mode and the constant blare of Light’s computer, an endless spreadsheet of irrelevant data. It’s all irrelevant for its original purpose; incorporated instead into a play Light has written. Only L knows/knew that. He does know, but he’s dead now. A baying memory. Not real. “The real is a nebulous concept, shifts from perspective to perspective from minute to minute.” The customary thumb curves along a pale mouth. “To which philosophical explication of the ‘real’ are you referring? If it’s the French Critics, we’re going to be here for a long time. Things might get abstract.”

Jean Baudrillard. Simulacra/simulacrum, copies of copies, denatured meaning. Deterioration from the original.

Incomparable.

Less than.

Light doesn’t say this outloud but it’s the first association his mind makes staring at the afterimage:

L was dead and all Light had left was the page and himself slotted in as successor. Inferior copy.

Saved the page for himself, traced the spiky letters, taller than, deep set in the paper, wondered almost hysterically, is it French? Did he speak French? How did his voice change, some people sounded kinder/angrier depending, where was he born? 

Held the name in his mouth in Roman letters, withstood the inevitable self-hatred burning through him at a prodigious rate at his growing obsession, nonsense words at night.

Now he has this degraded image that talks back. A reminder.

Not real.

Not the same.

Light’s throat inflates with an aborted scream. He won’t allow him the satisfaction.

Instead, as if to ground himself against the rising delusion Light says:

“You’re dead.”

It (not he not he, IT) says nothing and the pause almost lulls Light into believing this will be the abrupt end. It is nothing but a brief apparition of guilt or whatever, a fragment of sleep deprivation and loneliness, easily dispatched by Light reasserting the facts. 

The facts: Light’s hands recall the absence of warmth, dilation of the eyes, the final movements of facial muscles and rigor mortis. Some one had to call an ambulance, Light’s mind racing with commands for tears, hysterics. Two days of blankness. How much was too much? Which part of himself was he falsifying when he walked into the bedroom by himself with no one around to watch him, hollow-eyed at the foot of the bed. The funeral was three days ago. Christian burial. The dirt from his grave is still on his suit. The only time so far it ever felt like a victory.

It would be an easy, non-event if so easily dispatched. But L never made a situation less complicated or ‘easy.’ L proper, was barely capable of the simplest of kindnesses. Everything he did for others was hamfisted because he couldn’t care less about anyone but himself and was unrepentant in it. It was one of the reasons why Light hated him and why he admired him so.

It makes sense, it does, that a ghost of L would be as relentless and irritating as his real self.

L climbs up onto the desk, forgoes the crouch and sits straight-backed, long legs diagonal, a slash against the utilitarian metal. The dim glow skims his profile, darkens one eye, curves around the other. They remain the same, graphite color. Pinprick intensity.

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Light?”

Much like a sign might say not to feed the animals at the zoo, the persistent pragmatism that often guides Light’s survival instinct tells him not to indulge the hallucination.

“Do you believe in the afterlife, Light,” L asks, voice like a dull thud in a hallway.

Light swallows around the dry ball in his throat.

“No,” he says, not quite looking at him, it, projection of a thing that once was (it’s him, it looks like him, call it by his name, it feels so good to think it again, it feels like sinking into tar and suffocating). It seems less foolish not to look, and yet it still throws him back into an old pattern of feeling flayed open, on the defense and alive and terrified of being seen. “There’s nothing.”

The thing, notL, makes a considering sound, shifts position. He’s a noisy manifestation of the other, Light thinks, irritation more than he can stand, cut as it is with the closest possible relative of despair. All the sounds are familiar, match the meticulous catalogue of memories compiled unconsciously while sharing the same space for an interminable amount of time.

“You sound rather sure. Who told you that?”

Light chooses not to take the bait. They both know the source of that knowledge.

“I just know.”

“Shinigami,” L says, an accusation but what’s the point? They all know what they know and Light wouldn’t take that back for all the gold in the world even now when he’s mired in an agitated terror at something that is not, cannot be real. His own mind imploding under stress just as the road is clear of any other sign of trouble. The irony. 

Ryuk, Ryuk where is he, Light thinks, desperately, like the death god is a talisman. He’s brought such good fortune so far.

“I have to go to sleep,” Light whispers, finally, slowly, peeling the headset from his face, sticky with sweat.

“Of course,” L lifts his arm in a wave. The chain is there and it clinks, a delicate sound. “I can wait.”

\----------------------------

The only reason Light is still alive is the Ambien he found during a shaky ransacking of the infirmary.

The insert looped around the bottle warns of hallucinations, sleepwalking, parasomnias.

Light stumbles along the hallway towards a bed, any bed, but not that bed. Never that bed, not again.

It’s the Ambien, he repeats to himself in refrain.

“L via Ambien,” he murmurs, poised to fall into a white duvet, shoes still on.

He laughs, looks over his shoulder.

\-------------------------------------

 

The dreams have been horrific at times, just bizarre at others.

Heavy, iron-clad monsters on his chest, clawing in so that he can’t breathe, things that yell at him behind a curtain. He’s going to hell for what he’s done, he’s been a bad boy.

Nebulous cartoons of himself laughing.

He sleeps, yes he does, yes he does, yes he does.

But there’s a price that digs into him and won’t come out.

Something has changed and he struggles to find the error in his programming.

But it’s too late.

He knows that, even now.

\------------------------------------

“Light.”

A warm palm up against his back, like when he used to fall asleep on the couch waiting up for his father as a child and had to be carried up to his bed.

Warm.

He’s split between two places:

A bed and those last three days: walks of silence on both sides. Not speaking unless spoken to. L didn’t touch him again, not after that night and it would have been a relief were it not instead a rejection, a hole of spite and resentment and fear. It wasn’t self-control, Light knew that L never denied himself anything he truly wanted. It was a kind of pain, Light felt, knowing this.

“You’re freezing me out, L,” Light says to him, in full glory of his plan’s success. An insincere question, obvious to both of them. Light knows why L is barring him from his thought process. L knows that Light knows.

He sees L’s awareness of the cross-hairs burning cold in every glance between them and revels in it.

The truth feels like an intimate wound. Standing under glass stairs, L’s vanity, soon to be shattered. Light wears a mask but so cleverly deciphered anyway. L looks at him with such a loathing and it’s worth more than any other moment because it is real.

They are themselves as they have never been, even dismantled and fucked/fucking.

Words are unnecessary but L always has to have the last word:

“We are but two ships passing in the night, Yagami-kun.” Sarcastic, hollow-eyed.

The sound of footsteps and crystalline fractures in Light’s glass-blown viscera. 

 

“Light.” The voice repeats and Light floats up from the haze as the hand moves up to his hair more hesitant than he’s used to, more respectful than the only person who has touched him for weeks now. He opens his eyes, struggling against the heaviness in his entire body.

His father’s worn face, concerned. It’s the only sort of face he makes anymore when he looks at Light, working, Light not eating, Light passed out on the bed.

“What time is it,” he asks, voice half-drowned by his pillow.

“Quarter to one.”

Light rarely, if ever, sleeps in. Only when ill. Light would laugh but his limbs feel encased in concrete. His father’s worry is another piece of furniture in the room and yet he can’t marshall up the energy to assuage it. To pretend.

He hears the pills rattling against plastic.

“Have you been taking these,” his father demands, not even bothering to read the bottle before sounding disappointed.

“Couldn’t sleep.” Coming online, the night returns to the fore and he wants to take another one for a fake death. Maybe more because Light remembers seeing him and the persistent horror that it wasn’t a dream. L after image, mobile, staring into him. Light lets out a shaking breath. “I see him. At night.”

Both of them stiffen at the same moment.

Light hadn’t meant to say that out loud and yet it’s as if it was scraped out of him, the desperation claws it’s way up his throat.

“Light,” his father sighs. The wretched expression in the premature folds of his face, the slump of his posture as he kneels down beside the bed like Light is on his last tether (maybe he is, all signs point to a fracturing somewhere inside but no, he can salvage himself, he’s been backed into a corner before and ahead there is nothing but open highway, benevolent sun) prods Light into the defensive.

How to extricate himself from this? What can he gain from this unplanned moment?

Light allows a cursory instability to bleed out and he meets Souichirou’s eyes.

“I killed him, dad.”

It feels beautiful and irrevocable to say those words out loud and to know inside, they are true, they are true. And if he could let them live outside of himself, his mind and body as they are, as a benediction rather than a condemnation he would be free to let the dregs of his affection die. But Light must thwart the dawning horror in his father’s face and restrain the vengeful creature that wants more blood, didn’t get enough even with the titan that it ate. Light swallows.

“I couldn’t solve it, Dad,” he says. Light reads humans like sixth grade novels and he sees Souichirou’s terror dissolve into shame at his own disgusting, impossible assumption that his son was confessing to being a murderer but it rearranges into pity, sadness. Souichirou places his hands on Light’s shoulders but he is shaken off.

“Now he’s dead and it haunts me,” Light continues, choking as if ashamed because this Light, any Light would be ashamed of this. “He haunts me.”

His father is not taking him literally. There is a line to straddle here between grief and sanity. Tipped too far into the truth and Light would be removed from the investigation, sent to a psychologist, back to university like a good, useless broken boy.

No, his father is seeing a tragic mirror of his own sense of responsibility for his subordinates, victims of human evil. Light is playing the part of the son Souichirou thinks he has and will never doubt ever again because he feels so strongly, his poor boy. Such a good boy. Lost his only friend. Such a pure, righteous boy, he will lead the way, he will fight for truth and justice.

His perfect boy.

Light forces himself to sink into the rare show of physical affection from his father, attempting to comfort him and Light could almost muster up a smirk but the feelings, disconnected from the origin, churn in his stomach, wailing, clambering.

Foolish boy.

His lies always have a price. Or so he’s been told before.

\------------------------------

The next night, Light is prepared.

His hair is combed and he is immaculate, drinking green tea instead of processed sugar garbage, while working.

“Are you enjoying yourself?”

The voice, the same timbre but boosted with a wrongness, prompts the cold swipe of fear down Light’s spine.

The specter settles spitefully in Light’s periphery. Not out of cowardice but to bolster the sense of unease. Light doesn't bother to look at him. He wore the same outfit everyday in life, he wouldn’t change in death. He’s always been a stubborn fuck, Light thinks.

“Oh yes. Just destroying your entire life’s work.” Light closes a line of code with a particularly vicious flourish. “Not much to show for it, have you?” He’s managed to delete the final copy of the Kira case record of which there were 50+ copies on various servers. If others exist, Light has no control over them. He trusts in L’s paranoia and isolation and the fact that there is most likely no one else living who knew or cared for him.

The idea gives him a steady supply of satisfaction. It buries the twinge his naive, moron version had felt knowing L was a sad orphan.

L’s mouth lifts briefly in the humorless taunt of a smile. Images carry associations across neural networks to launch memories. L’s smiles have always been rare. Especially after Light got his memory back, after the charade was over for the both of them, and they could only live in the detached dichotomy, detective versus mass murderer, protagonist versus antagonist and they could not be alone with one another because the vital cord of their connection had been disconnected, retracted and rerouted to the cortex of their survival instinct.

They’re in prenatal dark, alone with the constant deja vu of their rooftop scene.

Everyone gets one in the final stages and they got theirs--one last fatal moment of honest cruelty before the end. L’s gaze is the same one blurred by cold and downpour, accusatory, and as indiscriminately hateful as an armor piercing bullet.

“No, I suppose not.” L admits and Light’s insides freeze. “But then again, do you?”

“Do I what?” Light turns around, pretends to consider his screen but it’s all gibberish. His head pounds.

“Do you have anything to show for what you’ve done?”

Years from now, Light will acknowledge that the question contaminated him, brought forth hidden damage, the bit of him that always remained self-aware, questioned every move, deteriorated at the end. Whether it was real or not, L was the voice that always whispered the question: Is this all? Is this all?

L as a projection of his burning self-doubt.

Even worse (or better if Light’s spiteful sense of humor kicks in): L as Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, dragged down in chains, mournful glances and doomed to an eternity of rattling around, nagging at him to change his life before it’s too late.

Light gasps for air, his laughter echoing across the expanse of the deserted room. L’s expression never shifts.

“It’s so funny, isn’t it, Light-kun.” Light only laughs harder, part schadenfreude, part agitated nervousness.

“I have to tell you, this is the best dream so far,” Light taunts, turning back to smirk in its face. The unyielding stare makes him falter for a second but he regroups. “Failed, immoral detective trapped for all eternity as a shit, ghost moral compass. If only it were true, the irony.” Because Light held his corpse, danced on his grave and he’s feeling fairly lucid now and the Ambien. This is just processing. He’s just getting used to the idea of nothing in his way. A waystation before his new world.

“Still under the impression that this is a hallucination.” L confirms this with the bird-like tilt of the head he used to give pre-annihilation of another’s, usually Matsuda, irrational/moronic observation.

“You are. Not all of us can go years without adequate sleep, I’ll give you that.” 

L, not L, moves out of focus and Light stares hard at the spot in confusion before he feels it, a thin line of cold, puncturing force against his cheek.

A slow line down the slope of his cheekbone like a tear not water but as if part of his face is being cut by a butterfly knife.

“’Do you doubt your senses?’” L’s face, sharpened in brutal contrast is all that Light can see and the fear, horror liquefies his insides. He can only stare, without breath, and the sensation of his mind being turned out and uttered verbally by someone not him is not unfamiliar. It was something he got used to when they were alone together, when they were with others but as characters in a play, all other figures painted in as scenery. They were always the only ones who existed.

The other dreams, the incessant longing that produced them, could not manufacture that or touch, the scalpel feel of L’s finger, brittle in death and ghost mechanics. Light’s lips move as if to say one of three things: ‘why,’ ‘how,’’no,’ but L draws back and Light shivers too hard to complete any sort of action that involves speaking.

L waits until Light has grasped at some sort of composure before he speaks again.

“What is the preferred scenario? That you’ve gone insane with guilt or ghosts are real and I’m haunting you for a higher purpose?

Light cannot wrap his head around the question in it’s entirety.

“I wanted you dead. Why would I feel guilty,” Light demands. “This is my victory.”

The small humorless smile, hazy in the quiet of Light’s unhinged mode of despair at Light’s answer, kicks him in the stomach back into a pool of emotional murk he couldn’t decontaminate and set aside because it scared him. 

“Yes, it’s all open skies now, Light-kun.”

Light grips the edge of the table. L always burned cool and Light comparatively quicker to emotion, to rage, to fight but it was always part of L’s unnatural aura, this calm until the moment L himself permitted a calculated reaction. The only time Light ever saw him lose it he still doubts to this day: L falling out of his chair in shock at the mention of shinigami by the second Kira. It was a calculated prod in his direction, much of what L said or did to Light fell in that category.

Everything.

“Damn right,” Light utters, his voice suddenly ferocious with the high stakes of his denial. “You lost, L.”

There was nothing in his way now.

Ryuk said something similar, nothing in his way now. But it occurs to Light that L doesn’t dare visit when Ryuk isn’t in the room. Or is it that Light has indeed gone insane and his mind transposes Ryuk for L now when he’s without an audience. Such an accurate likeness, too. His mind does good work and for a moment Light stops pretending that he hadn’t memorized all of L’s physical components.

Of course he can’t ask Ryuk.

Light knows how that conversation would go. Ryuk would laugh at him. Accuse him of cracking up.

Grieving.

This is not grief.

Grief is not this shaking combination of giddiness and terror. Grief is a weight.

He is finally free.

Perhaps that’s why he’s so terrified.

“Strange, isn’t it,” L says. Light doesn’t look at him. It’s pointless, it’s the same conversation. “To have nothing to look forward to.”

“On the contrary, there’s lots to look forward to, actually. Lots to do.” Light’s voice is an uptick of manufactured cheeriness. He passes his hand over his mouse, logs back in.

“Your new world.” L comes as close to a sneer as he ever has.

“Yes, my new world. without hypocrites like you in it.”

“Barring yourself of course.”

L pauses for the hit to land. Light’s fingers claw into the metal desk. L continues, the noises of his gesticulations as jarring as shrieking in his ear.

“Because murdering others to create a utopia where murder and everything else in the universe is punishable by death is the definition of hypocritical in case you haven’t quite figured it out, yet.”

They’ve had this conversation but never quite out loud.

“You are a fucking broken record.”

“No, I don’t believe we’ve ever had this conversation with you as Kira. You’ve always been someone else.”

“Someone else,” Light echoes. His ears start to ring.

“Yes. Someone else. We’ve had this particular conversation before. About how you’re a liar. The parts you play.”

“We all wear masks, L. You’ve spent your whole life pretending to be other people. Don’t think I never understood that about you.”

“I never pretended to be anything different. I’ve admitted that I’m a liar. You still refuse to acknowledge it.”

“I’ve lied to you the least. That’s why you had to die.”

Light says this in a mild tone, as if explaining why he buys a particular brand of cereal. He thinks about what it would be like to say that to a room of people who are alive and not depraved or empty like he is. Would it be a relief? Or would it feel hollow like this?

He looks over at L, not L, who wears the appropriate expression of creatures of their caste, unperturbed, a bit bored. Contemplative.

“I’ve never wondered, not genuinely, about how you live with yourself. I know how you work.”

The chill laps at the back of Light’s neck, like ice water being poured over him.

“Really. Do tell.” The prompting is pointless. L would keep talking even if denied the opportunity.

“You’ve always reminded me of myself in some fashion. We’re very similar.”

“So you’ve said.” Again and again to the point where Light had built a little shrine to it and burned it when it revolted him, rebuilt it when he felt so lonely and disconnected he thought he would scatter into nothing remaining. He had burned it when L had died because it was a stupid thing his naive version had made. They were the same but had chosen different roads. Light did not believe in hanging onto anything. It weighed him down.

He still believes that. He stays silent. L shifts in his chair. 

“You don’t agree?”

“No, I don’t.” Light snaps, turning around in his chair. “We’re not the same. You were a robot, L. Automated. All you’ve ever cared about is winning. About what the scoreboard says. And you always had the gall to say I was artificial.” Light takes a breath and spits out: “Hypocrite.”

L smiles his empty, imbecile smile and it takes all of Light’s self-control not to launch himself at the shadow.

“I suppose each version cannot see the other when it’s out of the box. The boxes don’t always have windows. You can’t always see it while it’s happening.”

Light is emotion, thought lagging behind one another.

“What,” he asks, stupidly.

L spins around lazily before arriving back to face Light, drags his chair to sit close enough for their knees to touch. Light feels the whisper of denim barrier, change in air for proximity.

“Who are you now?”

Like a loud noise cutting through him, he stares at L who is luminous. The vengeful one.

“Which one are you now?”

Light is hung up against a wall with knives in every vital part of him.

Light opens his mouth but no words come out.

He thought he knew.

\---------

 

“This is the grace period.”

“Between what and what,” Light asks, numb. He can’t pinpoint the origin of what L is saying. He’s alone in the bedroom, large bed, a sea of white, himself and a laptop. He should know better than to sleep here by now but he has three days to finish and he’s doing it by himself with a spiteful boulder weighing him down.

And what grace? What does it mean? Some moment of peace bestowed upon him? No. Benevolence? No.

L’s face is a blur in smooth darkness.

“Before the penalty kicks in,” he says and Light tricks himself into believing that face softens and a slim hand reaches to touch him with no landing blow.

Light closes his eyes. 

It’s easy to believe in his own portrait of quiet jubilation and peace as long as nothing overtly contradicts or questions it. No one else could know that the voices composing his inner life now conflict. They agreed on a truce and now the reason for that truce is gone. They have made it to where they were supposed to go only to find out they’ve got the wrong fucking island.

He needs them to realign for the greater good. 

He wants to ask what the penalty is. Is it death? Is it humiliation? Or is it not external at all but an extended allegory of what he feels inside, a weakening of essential lining, gradual ebbing of a coldness sealing him together. 

“Do not overthink it,” he whispers to Light. “You will know it when it comes.” 

It involves knowing where he stands.

Or where he isn’t.

 

\-------------------------

 

“I don’t understand why you’re here,” Light says, after an hour of pretending to sort through PDFs of newspaper articles. He doesn’t look up, ensures his voice sounds absentminded, noncommittal. “If you’re even here.”

L makes a familiar low hum. He no longer takes care to fold himself into unattractive origami. Light’s mind has gone lazy, perhaps. L sits back against the computer chair, fingers picking at the plastic lever underneath him. He shrinks and grows taller for a moment before answering.

“I believe you should commit to one belief or the other. It must be quite tiresome to keep two opposing ideas in your mind at all times.”

Another rampaging echo. A full grasp of a situation requires that one keep all options on the table. Light knows this, lives his life by it. Never leave a blind spot, never leave your innermost core open, something could get inside to try and destroy you and other admittedly nonsensical rules.

But of course this version of L, so carefully reproduced (he won’t believe it, he’s not crazy, ghosts are not real, he’s losing his mind) looks always like it’s laughing at him.

“Why are you always laughing at me,” Light whispers and quickly, he clenches his jaw, wishes desperately to retract those words from the air. He lapsed into that old boy, sad person that isn’t him precisely, he’s just crammed full of all the emotional feedback of an entire life, unresolved.

Sometimes, it’s the default and he says things like this because it’s been let out past the veto process of all the other network of personas, colder and more shrewd than the one that still feels pain.

“I’ve never laughed out of genuine amusement, Light-kun.” L is high up in his chair. “Sometimes, one laughs because every other possible response has become difficult to access.”

Light understands this acutely and cannot speak with the jerk of phantom pain. Cluster of regret and longing and full awareness of L’s absence cuts through him for a second and perhaps this will elicit the full weight of a physical response just enough for his karmic debt to be repaid.

No, he doesn’t believe in karma but there is a part of him that knows he lost everything on a stupid mistake, writhes in desperate guilt, longs for the old song and dance of salvation and redemption.

“I won’t bother to choose,” Light says, voice cracking as it freezes again. His own bloodshot eyes waver in the reflection of his cold coffee and the ache in his limbs ground him in the moment. The way forward is always clear if you never look back. That is the rule. “This changes nothing. Let whoever sent you know, it changes nothing.”

“No one sent me. This is a private matter.”

Light’s laugh is skittering and fake.

“I’m fighting myself then?”

“If you want to be cliche about it.”

Maddening.

“You’re staring,” L says, leaning in. He reaches out his long, pale fingers and flicks Light on the nose. Light’s hands move immediately to his nose, upending his weight out of his own chair.

“I thought ghosts weren’t supposed to be able to move or affect objects," Light heaves out as he stands and dusts himself of shaking with a mix of fear and embarrassment.

“It’s not impossible. Requires a bit more effort, than it used to, however.” L says this even as he picks up a teaspoon from beside Light's abandoned Oolong without time lag or difficulty. The top 99th percentile of ghosts, Light thinks, acidly.

Absent the faux rancor, L seems as close to his original state of exhausted vigilance as when he was alive. The silence intercedes in a suffocating intensity and Light’s mind erases any sort of antagonistic bile before he gets a chance to let it out at the curve of L’s features in the gray cast of many monitors. If he could be a silent ghost, a slight pulling sensation in his chest region, an ambiguous symbol of his own emotional weakness (maybe guilt, maybe regret, maybe some parceled off foreign human part that persists) Light could live with it. He would hate it but find a perverse comfort in some fragile reminder and the uncontested dominance of his default rationality. Not this creature, that gazes at him with the same metallic puncture of the original. That can say all the things, find ways of hurting him in the brutal way an autoimmune disease might, to yourself, by yourself.

L says:

“I’m only here because you want me to be.”

Light tastes bitter metal.

Things like that, said with wide eyes and only the pantomime of guilelessness. 76% inciting, 23% apathy, 1% trace of unspecified rage and sadness Light infers, does not actually know is there. 

He knows L but it is a knowing without origin, frosted with doubt. He trusts in the accuracy of L’s attack to find a weak spot (oh his human side, he assumed it was gone but there it goes again up his throat he can’t talk).

The unraveling is a guarantee he has always believed in, deep down. 

His center, warring, cannot hold. 

\----------------------

 

Self-awareness is a constant burden. To watch yourself crash the car, to know, the impending strike of metal/glass shrapnel from when impact occurs and still remain on the same trajectory is insane. Light cannot avoid the knowledge that there is something wrong with him. He panics, in private, under the cool gaze, but he hides. His blood pressure is normal and his heart beat, regular. All distant. He walks away from it but he is within sight of the wreckage.

What must his memories be hiding is a question both Light and L ask; Light internally and L openly.

If Light is indeed evading, what must be in that mind all the time?

The fascination is mutual on all counts and they’re both willing to ride the edge of the cliff at the risk of all annihilation to answer that question.

They stare at each other.

Light often thinks about how L often resembles an abyss both in a symbolic, humorous sense and the most serious terrifying incarnation.

Morally ambiguous, eyes so opaque, they’re empty even they’re not, even when Light knows what he is reading in them, though he may not understand how he knows any of it. When he doesn’t like what he sees or when it spurs him into a turbulent emotional state he can’t disconnect from, no matter how hard he tries.

L is an abyss that calls out to him. Unknown monsters lurk within him; danger, future sorrows.

Light’s instincts tell him not to look in but he does it anyway. He always looks, always moves towards him, especially when he wants to run away. Foolish yes, but he can’t resist the call of the unknown, not when it whispers him alive so suddenly and viciously from the rest of his flatlined life to date.

 

\-----------------

 

The disgust/recoil response blinds him to the fact that it’s all a spiteful, careful illusion, constructed out of Light’s rigid expectations. The web is cast out of shiny, childish taunts and opaque faux-naivete.

Light knows it’s a trap, his instincts are quite good in that regard but he almost falls in anyway because he can’t help himself. He has to walk in, his ego won’t allow the cowardice/ weakness of avoiding it. Of hiding.

But the net has poison-tipped barbs and they claw at Light’s skin so that by the time he is found, he is foaming at the mouth, incapacitated.

“This is all an act,” Light dares to say out loud only once. L stares, finger moving up to his mouth.

“I’d say the same for you as well.”

No ground given.

The only confirmation in those moments when they’re too consumed with regret/hatred at their mutual captivity is to do more than lie verbally.

\----------------------

In his spartan cot, Light shifts onto his side, the scratchy fleece blanket irritating the bare skin from where his shirt has rucked up. He stares into incomplete darkness and imagines himself burning on a cross. The eyes of everyone he has ever known, shiny, gauzed with tears.

A martyr.

He will not cry out. He will stoically walk to his death, so be it.

Light glares at a portion of indefinite cell wall ahead of him.

The day he accepts his downfall as inevitable is the day they will take him at gunpoint. It is not the way he will die. He is not a martyr.. Martyrs are by definition, failures in a line of attempts. A fractured beginning so that someone else may gestate the ghost of an idea towards a more definite, concrete victory. Light will not allow another mouth to taste his victory. It begins and remains with him.

He shakes his head and the rustling of his hair against his pillow activates the motion sensor. The camera light goes from orange standby, to green active.

“How now, Light-kun?”

The voice. The timber of it drags up irritation and the reluctant answering intrigue.

He hates that voice, cannot help the anticipatory bite in the pit of his stomach.

“I’m trying to sleep.” Light flexes a hand behind his back to keep his voice streamlined, calm.

“You’re not doing a very good job of it.”

“You keep waking me up.”

“Apologies.” Insincere as the courtesy in all automatic voices and customer service attendants. There is a pause in which Light hopes L has gotten bored, or been interrupted by something more pressing than his bug in a jar (that’s how Ryuk refers to Light in captivity, Light can’t wait to dismiss him in the next stage).

“You know, I’m enjoying this insight into the hypocrisy of the justice system,” Light says smoothly. He would usually punctuate the coolness of his voice with a severe straightening of his spine and prim folded hands but he cannot move so wantonly. He must trust that his face can communicate his righteous disappointment. 

“Light-kun is an expert after all.” 

“I can only imagine what you’ve done with Misa.”

“It’s touching that you’re so concerned for her. Though I suppose she did give up a promising livelihood for a spot on Death Row.” Emphatic slurping. “It’s the least you could do.” 

“Misa is innocent.” Light infuses his voice with a boyish tremble. The quality of sound from L’s microphone is such that he can hear the whisper of the smoky scoff. Teeth clenched, Light notes that this is the most amusement L has let himself express since they’ve known each other. He thinks he’s won and is, in his understated way, crowing. Light has to fight the malicious urge to gloat. Stupid. They are on Light’s coordinated trajectory, no one else’s. He hasn’t turned the game in his favor. Yet. But he will. “Oh right, innocent until proven guilty is not part of your judicial lexicon.” 

“I will ignore the ridiculousness of that statement coming from your mouth and tell you that Misa has already proven herself guilty. Beyond reasonable doubt. I could execute her in ten minutes if I so wished.”

“You’re bluffing.” Stupid fucking Misa. He should have strangled her when he had the chance.

The silence on the other end only heightens the awareness of L’s glee (his face wouldn’t show it but Light knows his voice and the subtle scale of his intonations, decrypts its codified spite) on the other end. Light swallows, focusing his eyes on the uniform gray metal of the bars in front of him. The fury/terror inside is such that Light orders himself to retreat. He fucked up the battle yes, but he will win the war. 

“Are we done? I’d like to try and sleep again.”

“Would you like me to sing you a song,” L offers.

The smug sarcasm draws an immediate response almost thwarted by the enraged stiffness of Light’s jaw.

“I’d rather die.”

The malignant pause makes what follows it unnecessary but L has never been averse to ostentation even if it’s his own streamlined, surgical steel version.

“That may be on the table for you soon enough.”

End click. Camera back to standby.

Light imagines the small treacherous curve of a smile and swallows the dry heave that threatens to overtake him. On camera, he shows no reaction which later on, another version of himself will see and will begin to suffer the slow erosion of his artificial certainty.

 

\-----------------------

 

"You hold a grudge against me for that time,” L says, peering into the tea kettle Light shoved onto the coffee table between them a half hour earlier. It must be frigid by now but Light cannot muster any sort of emotion from his position on the couch, compress against his face to subdue the mounting, grinding pain in his temples. Prostrated by a possibly psychosomatic ailment, Light is stuck on the reality that nothing in this world prepares you with being confronted with the past quite so literally. Post-victory, Light expected a sort of peace of mind. Twinges of regret, sure, no one is perfect and murder is a delicate business all around but instead he gets an ectoplasmic albatross or a mental disorder. He cannot decide which is the worst diagnosis.

This L has decided to never stop talking, thereby creating a chain reaction of associations in Light’s mind, triggering a cluster headache, a retreat to the kitchen and the aborted comfort of tea he forgot about falling back onto the white Sunpan Modern Bugatti sofa, the angle of the arm more uncontested torture against his neck. “It’s quite humorous." L turns away from the tea set and realigns himself with Light’s half-covered face.

“What are you talking about?” Light’s voice is too dull for it to sound like an actual question.

“Your incarceration. You resented me for it even when it was clear to both of us what you were.” He is rather more matter-of-fact about this than he was alive, the constant allusions to Light’s duplicity were always turbo-charged with emotions Light couldn’t recognize as impotent rage until after. Maybe just as recently as L’s reappearance as a torture device.

In truth, It’s not him that holds the grudge, it’s the other one. The one that had no idea that they were harboring a monster.

Light opens his mouth and then closes it. Impossible to explain how his mind works to anyone. The only reason this entire situation spun ever so briefly out of his control was because he encountered someone he didn’t have to explain it to. Someone whose mind functioned like a similar hive of lisping, agonized voices.

They both knew it, were fascinated/horrified/grateful/bitter in regards to it. It was in L’s gaze when Light was particularly successful in deconstructing and stabbing into a delicate place, when it was a draw and when it was a clear win for either side. Even now, the facsimile knows it, looking down at Light’s very temporary moment of weakness, except the vehement loathing is gone leaving only the poison of a sadness that penetrates deeper, lingers in an imprint in the back of Light’s eyelids when he tries to sleep.

 

\--------------------

The connection is and always will be thwarted. Detecting it as a foreign element, the system will seek to terminate. A virus, biological/technological it doesn’t matter. It conflicted with what they both wanted, their objectives and ultimately had to to be sacrificed.

Light remembers yearning for something unspecified but he can only pinpoint those moments as remote pinpricks on a horizon. It requires movement toward those emotional locations, a return to the person he was when he yearned.

You can’t go back, however. He knows this, knows it well. Nostalgia is part pain because it is the dual awareness of beauty and loss enrolled in one. A moment in time lost, yet so fully encoded and tangible in the mind, it’s an inventory of what was, could have been and what will never be. Movement and the barriers that strong, willful people like himself aid against the emotional shrapnel of nostalgia. Like one would fight capture or entrapment.

Funny enough, it ended up being like quicksand.

The more he moved, the quicker he sank.

\----------------------

“Kira is delusional,” L says, breaking a tense silence. It’s downtime and everyone is either bored or demoralized, gritting their teeth against Matsuda’s nervous fidgeting noises. The only one doing any work is Light but he never stops, not really, except to sleep or go to the bathroom. He can’t afford it, mentally or logistically. Therefore, it’s time for one of L’s deliberate provocations masquerading as pep talk/inspiration to everyone else in the room who can’t detect the knife in his words with Light’s name on it.

This particular opening line insinuates two possible avenues (which open into a million different arteries each because L never has just one plan; every course of action has a shortcut and escape route bundled in) Light can detect in the first feint: either L is going straight for his ego which might balk at the idea that Kira is anything other than right or rational or it’s yet another exploratory mission into the world of Light Yagami’s moral infrastructure. Underneath the necessary barrier of resentment and detachment, Light knows L, as he knows himself and he absolutely will not rule out L’s ability to cover both routes within the first five minutes of this impending, most likely interminable argument.

“If you’re referring to Kira as a self-proclaimed religious leader,” Light interjects, without looking away from his monitor. He hears and feels the rattling, displacement of the chain as L moves to regard him with flat eyes. “I don’t agree. I don’t think Kira is that detached from reality.”

The room’s air thickens with what Light assumes to be the disapproval of his father and Matsuda’s anxiety combined. He continues anyway.

“Delusional implies some sort of mental disorder. I think Kira, for the most part, has his faculties in terms of everyday function.” Light says, scrolling down his spreadsheet. His voice is absent, he has his eyes on the data, but his mind is lost to a shriveling nervous feeling.

The entire focus of L’s gaze is on Light, pinpricks of spatial awareness climbing up the back of his neck. They spend much of the days staring at each other, Light thinks. Trying to unnerve or intimidate the other, mostly. Or that’s 98% of what L is doing. Light is always on the defensive, because he knows what L thinks of him, what he’s doing. And though Light knows he is not Kira, there are things he cannot explain, memory gaps he cannot account for and he is terrified. He knows that L will misinterpret that terror as fear of being caught and therefore he must focus, keep it at bay for his safety and sanity. The rest might well be fascination. Light has always been on the receiving end of those. Locker full of love letters, people stopping to stare. It’s nothing new.

But of course, none of them are him. Yes, there’s that knowledge that will outlive them all, the primitive awareness his sister used to rave about instead of doing her homework. It’s been there since they met, outlasts the bitterness that his rival is a gangly, pasty fuck up but Light shoves into a box labeled, ‘no’. Takes a sip of green tea. Changes screens, continues working despite the voltage of L’s stare.

“You don’t believe Kira believes his own rhetoric,” L asks, mouth clear of all objects so his voice is an unobstructed low timber. 

“No.”

“And yet, every course of action he has made supports a belief system that is innately childish and naive. There does not seem to be a discrepancy in that regard.”

“Doesn’t mean he is mentally compromised in some way. Unless you are being facetious. or making some sort of irrelevant value judgment?” Light’s neck is tilted towards L in a cold mockery of his usually incredibly sarcastic bird-like tilt. The air arrives at a temperature of hailstones large enough to concuss all passerby, shatter windshields but their faces remain smooth and blank. The rest of the task force shuffles and exchanges looks of alarm from within their separate viewing sphere.

Par for the course that Light must rely on the intangible shifts in icy density of L’s facial expression. In the throes of their vicious, conversational maulings, Light either feels so charged with the reality of his self-control--every physical, mental process acceding to his demands, awareness at full strength--or like a scrabbling thing in a centrifuge, no concrete bearing of ceiling or floor, unsure. Stupid. In this moment, it’s the caustic mixture of hyperawareness and lack of control. Like a play by play of his own impending death. On some level, it always feels like that between them. He never has his bearing for very long.

L rolls forward on his chair minutely, takes a sip of what is most likely tepid Earl Grey sludge.

“You exhibit a black and white morality structure.” He smacks his lips.

Exhaustion is a cold brick on Light’s chest. The sudden decompression of tension, of finally arriving to the blunt force of L’s intention (once again a paranoid accusation, devoid of actual proof, just predatory circling, consistent, predictable but still agonizing), makes the nausea float to attention as quickly as his own frozen corpse would, in space. 

“Leave it Ryuuzaki,” Light says, detaching once again from the menace of his internal murk. The danger, while never actually dissipating, straightens to a navigable path of jagged glass and poison. The current trajectory is known to Light; it is now a retread of suspicion and amused malice. Wearying, yes, but he can hang onto his desperate thread of his own rightness here. L is a paranoid, hunched backed troll on his bridge and all Light has to do is remain morally steadfast and he will make it through. Of course, the troll never relents in his own bitter craftiness; it’s his only redeeming virtue.

“I’m curious as to whether you would be against Kira if you were not my prime suspect.” L rests his chin in his long, delicate hands that alternate between grotesque and beautifully crafted, like most of him, Light thinks, begrudgingly.

“Killing people is wrong no matter who it is. A human life is a human life.” Light means this, he does but he is also aware of the part of himself that seethes with righteous anger, that bleeds inside every time a criminal goes free and the victim is left without proper resolution. He’s seen his own father hunched, with eyes clouded at the dinner table, late at night after a verdict is in and absorbed the tragic disappointment like a dead twin in the womb. It remains, thwarted and stillborn enraged inside and he is aware of it. From there stems the doubt, probably. The disjointed dreams and the subliminal waves that L must feed on, late at night, when there is no one to bring him his glucose.

“What if it were a criminal that harmed or killed one of your family members,” L asks. Light imagines him as a surgeon above him, pale jaw covered in sterile mask, nimble hands poking at the dead twin somewhere in his body, scalpel poking at the snarled teeth and hair. 

“Then I would trust the justice system to do its job.” Light resists the temptation to turn away, back to the detachment of his monitors of data, of the delusion that he is someone else, someone pristine and merely the victim of a paranoid hunch, a vengeful delusion. He doesn’t however and dangles instead, in the subliminal vertigo of L’s knowing gaze.

“But the system is broken, Light-kun.” The false sweetness of the honorific always a cold taunt, threat. “What if the criminal is wealthy? Or well-connected? What if the jury has been influenced by a threat or material bribe? Perhaps your sister was raped and the jury believes she was provocatively dressed and was therefore ‘asking for it’? Many avenues for error when you put it in another’s hands, isn’t there?”

Their private sphere converges with that of the audience as the tactless, brutal mention of Sayu in context of a common disembodied female victim stirs Light’s father from his passive viewing. Yet the fact that neither L nor Light acknowledge Souichirou’s activation takes the indignant wind right out of the Chief’s sails. Light’s own outrage is distant, ignored in favor of the preternatural calm that denies L any sort of satisfaction at an emotional reaction. Such control is not always possible, it’s that his father has fallen into the trap four paces ahead of him that Light can forgo the whole production altogether.

“It’s all we have,” Light answers, like he’s in a heated lecture debate, nothing more. A snapshot of their two-person play of friendship/circling sharks. “Anything else is a crime. It’s succumbing to the evil that made the original crime a possibility. There is no justice in that. Only empty, fruitless vengeance.”

In one of the many compartments of his heart, Light believes this. Just as in one of them, his hand might be a hammer, childishly god-like should anyone transgress his long, scroll of sins. It is the aversion to the basic lack of control over the dark, scrabbling recesses of the universe. He can’t look at it for long and remain rational so he pushes it away and it doesn’t necessarily exist when he isn’t faced with it. The problem is that he’s now constantly eye-level with a mirror and behind the face, the workings are so similar but darker-tinged like a warped future self, smug and sad with the terrible knowing.

“Very reasonable, enlightened points.” L nods slowly, thumb returning to mouth for a long-delayed reunion. “However, it requires a level of emotional maturity I don’t think someone like Kira has.”

“I don’t know about Kira.” Light’s voice is sharp and the gauge of L’s intuition jumps almost giddily in his eyes. “I know myself and I know that despite my ‘black/white’ concept of justice there is nothing to be gained from killing another human being.”

Their eyes meet, dead center and Light regrets it as if it’s aligning targets of missile and a city full of soon-to-be innocents. The compartments align and through the inscrutable wavelengths that they operate on, Light gets the bitter backwash of that feeling of being known and dissected by an adamant version of his own hands. When L speaks, it draws up the deja vu of remorse/hatred and the emotion with the longest afterlife of them all: despair.

“I almost believe you,” as if backstage at an off-Broadway play. He turns away, gates closed and leaves Light at sea, like he always does and Light thinks he should have drowned by now but he keeps kicking his legs, clawing to surface, for some reason, he doesn’t quite want to understand.

 

\------------------------------------ 

 

He has the same dream, still, full of memories he can’t account for in which he has the destabilizing sensation that he is watching himself, empty-eyed walking along a gray street with a woman he cannot see because something is blocking her face and the flecks of snow against his cheeks. Relief. Smug relief.

She walks away.

She won’t be back.

Safe.

You’ve done a horrible thing.

Stained.

Stains all over him. Won’t ever be the same. No. No don’t look. Not for you. Not yet. Not yet.

 

Light jerks awake to the immediacy of his own cold sweat, racing heart and the fear that he’s yanked the chain enough to wake L.

He can’t be seen like this, Light thinks. The worst thing about living 24/7 with someone who can think at your level is that you can’t hide from them, not even in your own mind. He can’t let L know. Not just because of the implication of some sort of guilt nightmare but because the only thing clear is the drugging hatred he feels for L sown to a haggard admiration. A fucked up monster he doesn’t really have control over. It moves, restlessly with him. It is weakness.

Light is not the sort to cry in his sleep about abstract things he can’t quite remember, to yearn desperately for a kind touch, any touch, contact, anything other than the sterility of imprisonment, constant vigilance. He wants warmth, like an animal, lower order human might. It’s been such a long time since he was this. He feels as lost as a child and he doesn’t want HIM to see it.

His breath is stuck somewhere in the vicinity of his heart like it was stuck there with a knife. Pain in between his shoulder blades and he tries to expel the tension in his rib cage but he can’t. He grits his teeth. He shakes.

“Light-kun.” He’s awake. Of course he is. Probably turned off his laptop to lull Light into a false sense of security, of privacy.

Light doesn’t answer, allows only a portion of a held breath out through his nose. There is a false silence and Light tries desperately to rein himself in, would have succeeded had L not struck first.

“I don’t understand,” L says, after a moment. It’s not the facetious, cloying voice when he’s playing a game. Out of confinement, Light fully understands the rules at play here now. No. It’s another one, stripped of thwarting layers, genuine in its coldness.

“What are you talking about,” Light asks, unable to keep the hitch out of his voice. He is shuddering. It must be a fever, his immune system faltering and he chokes in his own anger.

A pale hand jerks Light from his side onto his back and Light can’t see his face, only senses the cold air smothering his sweaty face and the concrete block of L’s hard voice slamming down on him.

“What is this? What are you playing at?”

Light’s mouth opens but negative space inflames his esophagus shut.

“I-” Light croaks unable to finish as L wrenches him up by the collar of his pajama top. A button comes undone and an idle, irritated thought at having to reinforce them again, crosses his mind.

“Is this little act of vulnerability supposed to fool me?”

The sensation of not enough air, of no visual orientation, of being closed in on, cornered by another solid body-

Powerless.

Trappedtrappedtrapped.

No logic.

He is an animal at the mercy of something wholly, childishly cruel, enraged to full strength.

“I’m not, I’m not playing anything,” Light whispers. “I just want to go home.”

The shame comes from how young he sounds in playback and how pathetic he must have seemed to L. It’s black bile in his mouth that he can’t get rid of.

Meagre gratitude for the darkness that shields his face but Light has the desperate urge to kick out for escape.

But to run is to admit guilt. To run is cowardice.

Light is not a coward.

He’s not.

He’s NOT.

“I despise you,” Light says, because he can think of nothing else to say to the fugue of L’s paranoia. He is inside the awareness of a gun being held in his face by his own father and the agony of knowing that his father would put him down if it came down to it.

His eyes fill with tears, emotion gouging it’s way through containment. He wants to weep, bitter, angry, red-faced tears, dissolve in them, in the caustic mix of defeat and despair. He hangs on the edge of a moment by a hair's breadth.

The overwhelming spatial disturbance of L’s sudden, incomprehensible fury ejects itself and L’s grip on him slackens. L shivers suddenly and seems to expel a certain amount of loathing before his face resets, back to neutral.

“That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me,” L murmurs.

The tone of his voice guts Light, inserts a noxious hatred back in and he can only wonder at the strength of his emotions. Why does this decimate him so badly, he wonders, trembling to himself as they lay backs to each other in a faux trust that is actually only the product of grudging necessity. The only way they can each pretend they are not there in that mixed up moment. 

Light has never wanted so desperately to be believed. It occurs to him that all others have been shadows on a wall, rendered in low quality apart from L. Easily digested and appeased as he wandered through a heavily filtered world. And now by some accident of fate, he has pushed through to a three dimensional world ruled by a being who cannot and will not be consumed and discarded like the others. Will not be cowed to remain in the background as Light proceeds to an unknown destination. 

Is he angry?

Why is he so angry? 

Do I not have a right to be angry?

What is it that he sees in me that I don’t? 

\-----------------------

The next memory, informed by future miseries, like the others was created by his other self, the incomplete, naive one. His emotions were so pure, it sickens him now to repeat it back:

Never has Light known the actual catastrophe of being seen until now.

The force of that feeling, even when guarded, cautious, scares him still. He was afraid of L, afraid of himself looking at L, L looking at him.

Afraid and partially hateful and still Light let it happen.

Brave boy.

They’ve just showered after another fight. Unclear as to what prompted this one. It was over Misa, but they always fought about Misa in a cursory way. Never anything heated or meaningful. L was fascinated by the idea that Misa meant nothing to him and yet he was concerned for her welfare. Light was appalled that L did not give a shit, but then he was always appalled and furious that L was not a moral ideal but an asshole masquerading as a justice system. L taunted him with something vaguely obscene/disgraceful and Light had responded with the first punch and they had grappled, uncontested until Watari burst into the room and sprayed them with a fire extinguisher. Awkward, averted gazes, attempts to distract with polite conversation and a frozen, edged silence.

Light stops, the snap of the elastic of his sweatpants contracting at his hips a resounding sound, a brief sting on his skin. L waits, silent, to snap the handcuff back onto his wrist.

The usual sarcasm, the prompting to hurry the fuck up is absent.

“You’re staring at me,” Light says, the desire to taunt sudden and overpowering and yet he does not dare quite to look into L’s eyes as he gives into a bloody inclination without much thought or resistance.

The open acknowledgment of fascination always turns them into belligerent children. Neither one of them wants to be the one to seem too preoccupied with the other outside of their detached roleplay of detective and suspect. Especially in this room, the bedroom, away from the investigation team/Watari which lend L his legitimacy. Away from the distraction, the task at hand.

“I am not staring.” L raises the handcuff listlessly but his eyes are boring into every part of Light that is exposed. Light would have thought he’d be used to the feeling after the eternity they’ve been in this situation. But he isn’t, not even now. He’s aware of his own blood pounding in his head, the water still in his hair after his shower and its sluggish evaporation. Survival in this realm has been about discretion, careful movements, restraint. Individually, they are more than capable. Light has lived his life in perfect, calculated arcs and L has made a career of those precise, deadly jabs.

Together, they sync perfectly, adept at anticipating, compensating for the other until L prods him back onto the defensive. There is never true peace, only a mimicry of it for the cameras. There is really only so much someone can take.

“You’re always staring,” Light says. This time their eyes lock and Light will hold his ground, it repeats like a refrain that it is essential. A display of disrespect or a power struggle, it doesn’t matter how L interprets it, the residual hatred has an impossible half-life. Everything Light does is a mockery to L. Everything is a provocation.

L drops the handcuffs. Up against the dresser, Light experiences the first agony of yes/no, certainty/uncertainty, mixed up feelings that will characterize the escalation between them.

There is no time to avoid contact.

L pulls him forward by the shoulders, handcuff disregarded and Light is frozen at the feeling of his dry, firm lips.

‘Push him away,’ he thinks, but he can’t, he won’t, he opens his mouth and kisses back and the thing that distresses him the most is despite the logistical intimacy of fighting, of hitting someone, it never quite occurred to Light until this moment how warm L is until he is this sort of close, pressed up against him, oppressed by his physical weight, the soft cotton of his shirt, unbearably aware of how little separates their skin--just L’s shirt and a sliver of air.

In the end, he pries himself away a fraction because the need to know overrides his inconvenient attraction.

“Get off me,” Light whispers against his mouth, eyes too heavy to open.

L stops but doesn’t pull away. He will never do anything Light asks of him, not completely. For someone who spends as much time as possible looking like a stupefied skeleton, the iron core peeks out now, beneath sinew and the granite of his eyes. It’s all been a trick and Light understands that now from the hard grip on his wrists and the way he has no space that hasn’t been invaded. His internal firewall sends out a warning of an intrusion. Light senses the subtle cues of an attempt to delicately tip him into a fatal misstep. A careful nudge. Artistry in it, but Light’s blood freezes.

He opens his eyes to L’s forceful stare. There is no room for negotiation and though sweat drips down the side of Light’s face, inside he is arctic tundra.

“What,” Light says, low. “You going to rape me?”

He whispers the word ‘rape’ in a voice with which one would offer an aphrodisiac, leans in for a kiss tinged with as much bitterness as he can muster. L pulls back immediately, not scared, never scared, unfortunately, but put off, clearly.

What does one say to that sort of accusation? Perhaps L has never believed in his own rhetoric of justice and truth but surely the concept of rape, disgusts him. Then again, hasn’t it been proven time and time again that there are no lines L won’t cross in order to solve his case. All the deferred feelings of wrongness and disgust come up to choke him so quickly Light can’t exercise the necessary control to compartmentalize it all again. 

“Perhaps that doesn’t bother you. You’ll have me confined in a cell for two months, my own father pretend to execute me on a deserted highway and other human rights violations. I’m sure you have a whole other definition of what warrants humane treatment. I’m just a means to an end for you. A criminal, yet another thing to step over in your game against Kira.” Light breathes heavily as his voice falters at the end. There is more to say, so much more but the words trample each other on the way out, clogging his mind. He’ll save himself the embarrassment and he falls silent.

“10.8%,” L says, throwing out another in a long list of arbitrary percentages thrown out in another attempt to deflect him, fuck him up, incapacitate. It’s a language onto itself.

“I wouldn’t do you the favor of taking the bait,” is what Light hears in a blank tone, the underlayer that is subliminally feral. It is a moment in the humid, too-closeness after the lust-hate trajectory has derailed but before they fully separate and Light knows that human memory is faulty, the power of hormone to derange is strong but the feralness, the afterimage of L’s finely-woven fury plays in Light’s mind in a coursing loop that has him shivering at the far end of their bed for hours until he finally tilts into engorged sleep.

 

\---------------------------

 

Emotions dictate their own projected events but Light side-steps them. He is a rational being, that is why he survives, ultimately, isn’t it? Doubtful. They were both rational beings but Light had an atom bomb. He cheated, or so he imagines L would scream at him in some cartoonish fashion as if L would let him hear it. It amuses him to think of L as the spoiled petty brat he always professed to be. There are hints of it in the debris of his thoughtlessness, relentless pursuit of a victory even in the face of its futility.

When he, Kira, Light original, is submerged, the instinct still gnaws at him and the rational creates a partition. His usual method of function. The volatility of his emotions regulated by the ever-roving, hyper-vigilant patrol of his super-ego or something.

Curiosity. He wonders what it would be like to deliberately attack instead of the general and constant evasive maneuvers. He is living in reaction to an elusive series of recollections like a trauma, except he has the increasing, acidic feeling he has more agency than he could fully understand.

The disconnected feeling is not new. It’s a product of believing one thing but doing another, of acting one way when really, inside, he might be something else. It is a constant awareness of the distance between himself and his image. Constant bombardment of positive reinforcement when he acts against himself for the comfort and security of another.

He makes others feel good or whatever.

Meanwhile, head full of static, no one home.

Forced inside of himself, the faded/false image confronts him with it’s hollow eyes and flat tone. Frosted over but it melts as he moves closer and underneath the coating burns an accusatory stare and it forces a homeostatic reaction. It awakens a false certainty in him, entirely a product of hurt and fear.

I cannot be this, what those eyes say.

I cannot.

\----------------

The configuration of the intimacy unravels from a tight, sinuous coil of malice--

“You’re a monster,” a whisper, along with the warmth of his tongue against the shell of his ear. Filthy. He never knew that was a possibility. His shirts were always so white and he always seemed so confused by human contact. Light should have known it was all part of the script. He wraps a hand around a long white throat and perhaps his eyes flash red like in a movie because L smirks at him with a fetching mix of rage/hate/lust that Light wants to convert into something tangible like a scream wrenched out of him in pain, a reaction, anything anything to lower him. Anything to crack him open so that Light may eat and inhale the fear of death, loss, that he can smell on him, knows is there underneath the metallic housing.

“So are you.”

\--to a rotating, vacillating structure, if one is thinking in terms of an external thing, greater than themselves. The ego allows nothing else. Between them it’s more immediately the stuff of constant instability, exciting perhaps in theory but it manifests in a mindless lust that hollows and carves out more than it results in a lasting emotion.

When they fuck and it isn’t hateful, what is it, Light wonders. 

To overcome the original aversion to the flesh they have accumulated in their respective isolation cells, it MUST be hateful at first, powered with the rage that obscures all the other little barbs hidden beneath in order to later devastate.

The first is a petty show of teeth and claws and they know it. Light is the one to grab him by the hair and knock him into the side of the night table but he fucks up. He is so horrified at the bottomless well of dark feeling that he freezes and allows the gap necessary for L to stand, blood down the side of his forehead, straightening, joints fluid, posture perfect, former exaggerated spinal curvature finally proven to be shards of an easily discarded act. Light’s horror subsides and is replaced with the voluptuous snaking of his hatred, so familiar now, it feels like it is all of him. But by then it is too late to regain dominance of this encounter (did he want to?) for long enough to make a difference.

He gasps into the soft rasp of carpet against his face as L holds him down and fucks him as he tries to twist away in overwhelm at the hard, precise thrusts. It takes him a moment to register that L is speaking.

“Nice of you to drop the act for once.” Only slight breathlessness. Galling.

“Fuck you,” Light shudders, moving his head to the side in an attempt to catch a glimpse of L’s face. His shirt is shoved off and bunched up at the wrists, locking his hands behind his back, the teeth of L’s clawed open zipper scratch at the bare skin of Light’s ass, the slickness of the lotion they used as lube, the shivering that Light can’t control even as he clenches his teeth to taste blood all a fraction of myriad indignities. The only show of mutual intensity is the force of L’s movements, alternating between exploratory and recklessly cruel. Then, of course, the low reveal of L’s voice against nape of his neck as he pushes him forward, lifts his lips and goes so deep Light screams for a mouth full of carpet fibers. It is entirely the worst feeling and somehow, according to a portion of his mind that is probably damaged beyond repair, what he deserves. 

“It’s gotten out of hand hasn’t it?” L’s voice is more openly smug/gloating than it has ever been and Light closes his eyes (in shame, rage, lust, terror at all the above) as he feels him suck the sweat rolling down the bare indent of his spine. Suddenly, the image of L unzipping himself like in a cartoon comes to mind where some villain animal reveals their disguise to shock and dismay of many.

“This is what you are, aren’t you,” Light laughs, choking after a moment, voice truncated as the unhinged quality shocks some distantly prim part of himself. He marshals up the only weapon at his disposal, clenching around L, impaling himself roughly (pain centers eternally, control is the objective). The gasp that comes from L’s mouth is enough to partially revive Light’s dead hard-on and he arches smirking, enjoying the tell-tale uptick of L’s pulse, breathing. “You’re a fucked up bastard.”

And so am I, Light thinks, smile fading, carpet fibers poking into his tongue. The impulse to detach, to surrender his body, make a retreat for his mind where he can ignore the ugliness of this, deny that it happened at all is strong but L does not allow him the escape/luxury.

He pulls him up onto his back and Light’s vision swims for a moment as the new weight of L’s hand against his throat reduces his access to air. The ambience of the room, neutral, nightfall, Light notes distantly, works in L’s favor. His dark hair half agitated by Light’s pulling and plastered with blood and sweat curves around his jaw, shirt torn at the shoulder to expose a pale contour of collarbone. The mouth is soft without reprisal even as his grip holds firm around Light’s throat. But it’s the eyes, like always, that give Light pause. They have lost the insipid roundness and regard him in a calm, yet overfull manner as if emotion were packed in them carefully, to the greatest possible capacity per square inch. He leans down, lips tracing the curve of Light’s panting mouth, gently.

“You would know, now wouldn’t you,” not a question, rather a definitive proclamation in a mild voice reinforced with a hard shove forward, barely concealed pleasure in the reflexive loss of breath as Light’s back hits the floor again, L’s hand a solid weight on his sternum where maybe a heart is. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t feel it.

In every sense of those words applicable, either of them interchangeable.

To know, ‘you know,’ accusatory tone, like invasive surgery without anesthesia. 

Guilt and fear numb him and he doesn’t feel the rest of it just watches L fuck him from somewhere inside of himself.

You made me this way, he thinks in a sluggish way, trying to hide beneath his hair. He can absolve his own part as an instigator even during, it’s a talent he’s always had. 

I’m all fucked up inside and you took advantage of me, or whatever is the party line but he knows his part. There is an unflinching compartment that acts like a recorder. Light was the instigator and he revels in L’s fall to the flesh. It turns out, he’s just like everyone else: corrupt and prone to fits of ego and straining for dominance in all situations. 

It might be disappointing to realize this as it has been all the other times Light has picked out a promising specimen only to have them die underneath his microscope. Life has been so disappointing, especially moments of visceral physicality where the victory does not compensate for the petty ugliness of it all. Light watches him in a dual mode, from inside and outside. Inside his own body he notes helplessly how L’s eyes go half-lidded when Light works him over. He makes human sounds, his skin is hot and there is a sheen on the surface. Sweat, exertion. It should be vulgar, this is all so at odds with the careful lines of his daytime life but it’s fascinating, the trace amounts of their physicality. 

“Have we stopped playing the game for a moment,” L asks, hooking Light’s arms up with the parts of his shirt pushed up around his wrists, up above his head in surrender. He doesn’t seem amused but Light tenses, defensive. 

“What game?” Light tilts his mouth up but L evades him. 

“You snarl at me,” L mutters, his eyes turbulent but unfocused like he’s having trouble rerouting his energies. “I put you in your place. It’s a thing we have.”

“Get off me,” Light says, meaning it, sort of, until L starts moving again. “You ruin everything.” 

L almost seems to smile at him but it’s hard decipher a previously unknown variable like a smile. 

“What’s wrong with you,” Light asks. He has not the breath to keep talking through his outrage and his arousal because his mind cannot fully understand what’s happening. Either you hate it and you leave or you can’t fathom anything else that you could be doing and you endure. Light doesn’t push him away, or extricate himself. He clutches at L’s white skin, regrets not pulling the shirt from his shoulders, wants to bite into the solidity of bone thinly disguised under skin. Fuck him up because he’s disintegrating underneath the warring factions in his own head of disgust and unspecified yearning. What’s wrong with me, is the next question but it’s pushed out of the queue in Light’s mind in favor of obeying the lower orders that just tell him to give up. Respond easily to the force of L’s lack of self-consciousness. Doubt.

A reset button is pushed when L puts his mouth on him and doesn’t allow for any other words to cohere and Light comes eventually even if he would prefer the vindication of the denied courtesy. It would at least bolster his self-hatred and repulsion instead of feeding the schism between base desires and his wounded pride.

Every night: 

The burn of it versus the acute pleasure interrupts the bitterness of Light’s thoughts briefly until he feels unbearably empty and animal-like. Get his quota of touch and endorphins where he can evade the important questions such as the reality that he is being debased (arching his back, allowing sloppy, artless kisses anywhere that can be reached, perhaps even taking off all of his clothes and actually fucking in a bed).

He does not have the upperhand. But then, who does for long enough to have the business cards made?

The positions don’t matter, they encounter the confusion on both sides. That it feels good to have a body underneath to supply the illusion of dominance is only intermittent. 

You can destroy someone from around them just as easily. 

 

\-------------------------

 

Light’s mind, much like L knew and constantly called up as evidence, is fond of idealistic binaries. L is an ogre wearing a hero’s mask to a world that doesn’t question surface. This man’s notion of justice involved torture, virtually every human rights violation possible, withheld kindness at every juncture, probably didn’t even know what it was.

Monster, monster, monster he would accuse but the word loses it’s meaning.

They throw it back and forth like a ball, numb, inured. It might hurt Light more than it does L mainly because when he looks down into himself, he does not find clarity just more feedback from others, thwarted versions, unchecked fear.

L is, on the other hand, self-assured in a way that is rare in that it isn’t based on self-delusion. Beyond that, Light cannot parse it.

When unable or probably more likely, unwilling to generate the facade of tactless, emotionally stunted detective, L is raw inscrutability, a grid of undefined symbols, taunting constantly with no real expectation of a solution. Light attributes his resting frustration (when they aren’t fighting because they are either too tired or they openly agree on something and are baffled by the very idea that it’s possible) to this. There is nothing on earth Light hasn't been able to solve and even now, Light has a better grasp of L and his subtle mercurial moods better than anyone. Still, he always feels like he’s stumbling around in the darkness not just regarding the uncertainty re:Kira but who the fuck is this person and why exactly does he make him feel like this? Unsure.

An undefined weight on his chest wakes him at night and he gets out of bed to stare blankly out the window.

Late at night, in their one of their civil post-coital moments, Light realizes that to him L is a point with no origin. How did he become who he was? Whoever he is?

It’s not important, he knows. It’s irrelevant to the endgame, finding Kira, exonerating himself. But so is the physical portion of their relationship, partnership, car crash. 

Sex has never been crucial. Light thinks of his own body as purely ornamental, a vessel for his ambition. And yet, they have sex with increasing urgency, like their bodies know something the rest of them, especially their minds won’t acknowledge. There is no room for questions, for the past ,when they fuck as if it’s both a protection and a way to supersede the natural boundaries that keep them from falling in too far. They never go away, the questions. They pile up in Light’s head as he tries to fall asleep after when L goes quiet, finally succumbing to exhaustion or more likely pretending to in order to insulate himself after succumbing to a human behavior for an hour.

He doesn’t ask, really. He doesn’t have to. L is already waiting in that corner, having arrived only a few minutes before, already primed for attack. 

“I’d like to know what you were like as a child,” L murmurs, in the dark. Light starts. 

“Why? Is it relevant?”

“Yes. Very. One often looks to a serial killer’s childhood for answers.”

Light is too exhausted to feel any sort of disappointment or anger. L’s questions are never the product of simple, human curiosity. He reminds himself that L is a lazy but ultimately vicious predator. Nothing more. Still, Light is distracted by the sinking in his stomach and he answers honestly. 

“I was...normal. Or I wanted to be.”

“Normal? Why would you want that?” L sounds genuinely perplexed. Light can’t help the small chuckle.

“I didn’t want to stand out. I didn’t like being treated any differently by my teachers. by my classmates. I just wanted to be left alone.” Light sighs. “Of course. I eventually got used to it.” To the point where he doesn’t quite know how to live as if he isn’t being watched expectantly like a trained animal in a zoo.

“And you?” Light ventures. He feels L slide over to the night table and hears the sound of a drawer opening and closing and rustle of what sounds like a wrapper. All Light can see is the lines of L’s pale chest moving faintly in the dark. He moves his gaze back up to the ceiling. Closes his eyes. A delicate sipping sound as L sucks on some candy. The artificial fruity smell joins them.

“I was always like this,” L says after a moment. “Perhaps a bit more naive.”

Light snorts.

“I can’t picture you ever being naive. Even with that face of yours.”

“My face? What’s wrong with my face?” The indignant tone is fake as L rolls over onto his side to stare at Light. From the corner of his eyes, L might be smiling but he can’t be sure, it’s probably why they can only talk like this in the dark.

“You look like a little boy.”

“You never quite know. I might be.” He presses the length of his body against Light, finds one of his wrists, holds it down against the sheets. “Yagami Light,” tongue against the shell of his ear. “you’re under arrest for the unlawful seduction and exploitation of a minor.”

“Damn, not again,” Light jokes. Somehow he’s capable of this even as his stomach sinks with unspecified dread.

The way of a carefree moment eludes him, eludes both of them. There is always a strain about the mouth and eyes. Even as they fuck, there is not complete surrender or oblivion. Attempts, more and more desperate as time increases the force of its chokehold.

For Light, it’s impossible for him to give in; the memory of a past and future cage lurks beneath the yearning as a reminder of where he’s been and where he’ll go lest he get just a little bit more stupid and give in to whatever illusion of humanity L projects in rare smiles, subliminal laughter.

“Are you afraid of dying?” Light asks this as he returns from the bathroom when the dawn has yet to taunt over the horizon, when it’s only remote radiation from the computer in sleep mode, city light from the window. He doesn’t bother to ask L if he’s awake. He always is.

“Are you?”

“Yes.” Light has never admitted as such to anyone and as soon as the word comes out, he feels a fervent shame.

“And yet you’re still willing to be involved in this case? That’s quite brave.”

“What else am I going to do?” It comes out like his windpipe is slowly being crushed and he sees his incomplete reflection in the glass, pale and strained and the sharpness of L’s side-profile contemplating. When L says nothing in response, Light turns around, returns to the bed, to lay, inert.

“What about you?”

The lack of response does not surprise or unnerve Light but his own sad feeling, the acute sensation of entrapment both at their sum perilously close to despair, does.

“No,” L says, finally, his voice low, from somewhere deep inside his body, Light can’t trace. “I’ve been preparing for it for quite a long time.”

\-----------------------

“You always did remind me of someone.” L is pearlescent in the dark. A poorly dressed nightlight. 

“Who? Satan?”

“Sometimes.” L barely registers a smile. “No. A person I’ve been told I had a hand in killing a long time ago. I don’t know how accurate that is, the source of that information had a penchant for melodrama and mind games but oh, you remind me of him also. ‘L did you know...” He trails off with a spiteful glance that seems to burn through the skin of Light’s shoulder even in the dark. “Though as yet another sociopathic serial killer he was a tad more self-aware, I feel.”

Light rolls his eyes, thinks of turning away, dry swallowing a few Xanax but sees it’s empty. 

“This is such an enlightening anecdote. I really learned a lot.”

L sits up, not bothering to account for the missing sounds of his clothes rustling because his energy is all in his voice now. 

“I’m not finished. You remind me of someone who went insane years ago. Let's call him...Abdiel."

Light’s eyebrows rise and he laughs meanly. 

"And the other one? The serial killer?"

"Belial."

“Wonderful allusions to Paradise Lost. I’m sure this will be very educational and not heavy-handed moralizing at all.”

L rustles as he crosses his legs. As if ghosts get leg cramps. It’s a pointed ‘shut the fuck up and listen.’

“They were proteges of mine.”

“Proteges? They let you around children?” Light grins at his own joke. Naturally, L ignores him, intent on his sermon. Light’s chest fills with the airy pain of nostalgia for an L whose perspective was lesser and still prone to anger/derailment. It was fun sometimes. This one doesn’t get mad at all anymore.

“Abdiel,” L starts, again. “had always been somewhat of an innocent. Stubbornly so. Unwilling to compromise those undefined parts that probably constitute a good person.”

“Like you would know.”

“Hence my conditional phrasing there. I didn’t know. I realize it may be hard for you to imagine given that your opinion of my moral compass is already quite low, but I was once…worse. I had no actual concept of the consequences of my actions. I was egotistical and detached from the world outside my casework. I had no empathy.” 

Light startles at this admission. Even as transparent as they’ve been, L admitting a flaw so openly still unsettles Light. 

“At best, they were accessories, at worst, milestones around my neck. Constant reminders of my mortality. I loathed them.”

His voice is cool and composed but Light tries to imagine a younger, alive L. It seems impossible for him to imagine an L that cares enough about his surroundings to loathe anyone. Yet, there is a part of Light that grasps for any small tidbit of L’s past it can even if it is now futile/most likely a hallucination. Like comfort from a story he is writing for his own sad gratification. He still feigns his disinterest, however. 

“And this is relevant because?”

“They were both different from me in away that I tried to force out of them. Emotional, codependent on each other, self-destructive, wounded by unfortunate circumstances. I did not know how to consider them anything other than weak. And I sought to correct that weakness in an admittedly callous fashion. I exposed them to horror after horror in the hopes that they would harden, become colder more capable machines like myself.”

“So this is about your guilt? Why should I care?”

“You have always seemed like a casualty of the disconnect between intellect and empathy. I suppose we both are in a way. Even when I could see the defective parts in you. I told myself that I was delusional and compromised. Perhaps…” he trails off. 

The only way Light’s come this far is by shutting himself off from the coarse, moronic little whispers of conscience that derail him. The primitive parts of him don’t know what they’re doing, they are susceptible to L’s enduring bullshit machinations. Even now, half-insane with whatever is going on inside his mind, Light will not give in to it. It could very well be some fairy tale bullshit he made up to confound Light. The ceiling is a cross-hatching of mottled shadows. Light is empty. 

“Belial, you said?” He made the connection within five minutes of the mention. He remembers the casefile, the curious lack of background, legal documents for the criminal, the mentions of ‘Backup’ in old case files, the meticulous encryption, the snippets of audio from a phone call with L’s voice forming a dead greeting and heavy, enraged breathing on the otherside. An orphanage. His intuition, inexplicable as it was, took him there. “Beyond Birthday, of the LABB murders. Killed 4 people including a little girl, burned himself alive, sent to San Quentin, died of a heart attack on January 21st, 2004.” He turns his head on the pillow to look right at his apparition. “I made my decisions. I stand by them.” 

L says nothing but the vacancy where pride should have been, used to be long ago when Light realized who he had killed, resounds louder than pronouncements. 

 

\----------------------------------

 

The days that he is chained here metaphysically with him are interminable. They are floating out of range--L an absurd balloon version of himself carrying Light up into rapidly thinning air. Or perhaps it’s all fatal gravitational forces, stripping a planet whole, leaving nothing but barren rock, a dead thing in silence. Light has a lot of these metaphors saved up. He could go all night.

The rest of the task force regards him with worry, naturally. Light is aware of himself as a distant, war-torn country. He tries to smile but it only causes further alarm. He likes to think that the fact that he still remembers to brush his teeth is proof he has not completely lost his mind but his sadistic shadow feels the need to remind him that standing under the water for five minutes does not count as a shower. This eats away at him, he thinks about it multiple times a day because he said the same thing to L a month ago.

He requires a forgiving mirror, a human anchor, to return him to what and who he is in the present, not a denatured distortion of himself, a series of warped, fucked up memories.

He invites her over.

Initially, as she runs up to him like a movie scene, her perfume a benevolent cloud and the soothing familiarity of being admired and loved and placed on a pedestal and obeyed without hesitation, drains him of his jagged feelings. They go out to dinner and he tells her about the apartment and asks her to move in with him and she reacts better than he even he suspected she would. She chatters happily and he doesn’t listen to a word of it but he smiles an empty, stupid smile and feels at peace. 

But Misa has never been able to complete a moment with him without fucking up something in her wake or overstepping her bounds. 

They return to HQ, now empty for the evening, and stroll idly through the hallways as Light tells her about the arduous task of downsizing the building’s ridiculous set up. Misa pauses in front of a computer (his computer), running a gloved hand down the edge of a keyboard.

“You miss him, don’t you?”

Light stops. The high-gloss marble floor duplicates the single trail of the ceiling lights. Modern dark, her face holds nothing but a compassionate blankness. He’s always assumed her eyes to be doll empty, or full of simple, primary emotions, easy to read and change but what a dangerous mistake that has been if she can look at him now and know the clusterfuck unraveling his mind. It never occurred to him before, the possibility that he would have to try very hard to hide from her. That it would cost him more than a few insincere gestures of love and attention.

He reacts visibly before he can adequately empty himself of all feeling and she can see him. Her eyes glitter at him, knowing.

Misa cups his chin, runs hesitant fingers through his hair. He is a passive doll for the moment, drained of all agency as the questions snowball inside her, unspoken.

“Light,” she whispers and he wonders, is that pity in her voice?

Disappointment?

He can’t endure it if it is.

He kisses her.

She doesn’t taste the same as she did the last time, he didn’t notice last time, the self-satisfaction had dwarfed everything. She tastes like metallic cherry, distorted flavors of human saliva and chemical aftertaste. Wet but she’s warm and that’s the only thing he needs. Someone warm. A hiding place and a diversion before it gets worse.

A response. Hands on his skin. She gasps when he pushes her back against the desk, touches her hair almost tenderly. She urges him forward, stares at him like he’s a dream she’s having she doesn’t want to wake up from. The avarice of needing to memorize the moment is in her eyes and the starved thing in Light’s chest that is bitter and hollow, sympathizes.

He pities her, he always has, deep below the hatred and disdain for how willing she is to throw her life away for a false god. She is a thing cursed to feel too strongly. She always gives into her terrible heart and lacks the higher self-control to stop herself. She may know more than she needs to know but she will always cede all power to him if he gives her just enough to feel valued.

“Did you ever fuck her, Light,” L whispers to him as in another adjacent moment, Light parts his leg with his knee, hooks his arm around, satisfied to hold him in the most cramped, uncomfortable position. He almost lies and says yes but it would open up the rest of what he’s said to scrutiny and the satisfaction he would get from L’s possessiveness (not guaranteed) would be temporary.

He hikes her skirt up, she arches to help him pull down her underwear and locks her thighs around the cup of his hips with more power and certainty than he would have expected from someone so petite, demure. But it’s always been an act, the coquette, fluttering eyelashes and averted gazes. Her shyness is as much an illusion as his earnestness. Perhaps he should feel connected to her. Two liars, caught in something that should be a moment of vulnerability. Her hand finds his on the smooth skin of her thigh as he moves to align them and he looks up from neutral territory of her body to her face and it’s always been a mistake to meet a gaze in this world, in this building. A charged, gorgeous mistake, more intimate than touch, more hateful that a punch to the face, it has been. To be seen or not seen, essential internal elements trapped inside a costume that no one has been able to penetrate. Light had evaded capture for years until one moment in a crowd, a pair of eyes punctured through to grasp him by the throat to bare his own in a predatory taunt.

She looks at him with compromised eyes. She doesn’t see him. Or rather, she doesn’t see that he is not there.

His hands pass through her to another moment. When he leans in, she closes her eyes and opens her mouth to his, angles her body for the closest possible collision of skin still covered in the lace of her clothes. ‘He wanted me so much he couldn’t wait, couldn’t take the time to undress me, he had to have me,’ is what she might think, it’s the narrative he’ll fabricate. He does, he needs her now but he needs her in the way he has always needed her, as a shield, as a buffer between him and that which might destroy him if he allows it full access.

He fucks her in this room, their room. It’s the room L last powered down, the last night. Where Light felt the intense and sudden glory of his victory and then nothing for months now. 

The topography of their skin is Interspersed with other, mixed up memories created on a fundamentally different machine. His other self, morally streamlined but choked with confusion who couldn’t do something as artlessly cruel as fake intimacy. He could barely keep the questions about his own possible fuck ups at bay. He must have been so transparent to L in his conflict. 

“It disgusts you,” L says, from on high. 

Light takes a breath, too long a space between this one and the last. 

“What?”

L moves again and Light solidifies underneath him with a moan, becomes conscious again, the pieces of his mind and bodily sensation returning from the outskirts. 

“This. That you’re doing this. With me.” 

Light’s hands flex on L’s hips. Bruises so easily, he thinks quizzically, because it’s at odds with how ephemeral L is. Then again, L is not the man. He’s the ideology. Ryuuzaki isn’t the man either. From the beginning it was ‘call me Ryuuzaki.’ No declarative statement just a declaration of war without the courtesy of subterfuge. ‘L’ feels closer to the core of what this thing is, if Light were to utilize his disconcerting knack for finding his way through the game but it is still a false passageway with spiked nails on the walls. 

Light is balls deep in a series of compartments not a flesh and blood human. 

“You’re not real,” Light murmurs this before he can fully map out how much ammunition it will give L in his repeated character assassinations. Bad move, always. He scratches down the expanse of pale skin, as if to punctuate his point, the body will disappear into the increasingly unstable realm of nightmares. 

[To be seen and to see and to ascribe words to what is seen as if there is no actual disconnect between what people say they are, the face they present to the world, what they aspire to and what they wish to have others believe that they are as if the world is honest and made of the purest intention is this what that is or are they leveling up in their lies, lying about lying impossible I am already a corrupted descendant of the original version]

The shadows in the room add suspense, obscure the derisive smile on L’s face. Rage is distant but it’s there. If only they could remain on that frequency of mutual distaste/dislike of being too similar and on opposite sides. Instead, they toppled into these diseased moments bloated with an undefined tension incorporating that negative feeling with a fatal sense of reluctant fascination. Neither of them liked to be uncertain. Even as L seems to enjoy Light’s constant inner conflict, it carves out its own pound of flesh from L regardless. 

“What can be real here? Do you want to open that box? We’ll be going back and forth on that for ages.” 

Scolding him as if Light is proposing marriage when all he wants is the nausea in the pit of his stomach to go away. A feeling there, beyond the physical that he can’t understand, it’s never been there before. It’s composed of a sense of futility, an awareness of a larger scaffolding he’s set to hang from. It makes Light chafe. He brings his hands up to L’s shoulders, presses down and they both dissolve into brutal motions. 

It feels good to be skinned alive, slowly, Light thinks when L wrenches his arms up, holds him down with his body. Even the bad feelings are more than he’d ever felt. Such a charitable thought is so very dangerous. It will get him killed. 

In the end, L’s right (obviously not something Light will ever admit outl oud). They fuck in the interstitial spaces of where desire and obligation conflict and fail them. Detective and murder suspect, career liars, inhuman inside possibly (L definitely, Light is desperately afraid that it is the truth). There’s no room to take off your mask and show your face. 

L presses his mouth against his, not a kiss but a silencing maneuver. He pulls back, frowning or as close as is possible (his face has such a subtle range perhaps it’s just shadow trickery/projection).

“You think I’m a murderer.” Light fixes his gaze on the outline of the dresser across the room. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

You might just be.

Shaking his head, movement draws him back to L stroking himself, half-lidded. He can be attractive if the room is strategically dark enough, almost smirking, rotating his hips so that Light’s stupid thoughts scatter and he wishes he’d never said anything. Perhaps he is as humorless and stupidly earnest as L says. 

“It never occurred to me.” Sarcasm. Evasion. Pointless, utterly pointless. 

Light surges up and pins him down to the mattress, pushing up his knees up against his chest, an obscene version of his usual sitting position, thrusts in without mercy and L only looks up at him as if they’ve merely switched rooms for a place to continue an uneventful conversation about air filters. But his heart races against Light’s skin and the very present hard on between them, the smell of sweat and sex and all other physical variables which are real and still do not factor in to the game, gauntlet, war between them. They both shake and want to come but does it matter? 

Have I been compromised? 

What is wrong with me?

She looks up at him and he can see everything she feels. He touches her and she reacts tenfold. His hands, mouth are only tangentially relaying sensation to his brain. A million miles away, she glows for him in a dark room with drowsy computer monitors and echos of their slovenly movements.

She doesn’t hide from him and what is that like to live a moment that way? 

He couldn’t even have that with him and it smarts somewhere deep inside. 

Her brow creases. Maybe she is paying attention. He says her name, and he hears laughter behind him and the gliding disturbance of air. Ryuk over his shoulder. 

“You like to be watched,” L whispered, a long time ago, into a microphone and Light did not let himself react but it was true enough. Ryuk had laughed then too. 

Admired yes, he needed it but in this moment he is like all the rest of the grasping ugly horde outside the building seeking to reconcile the void within with the void of another. 

You can’t go back, you can’t you can’t. You cannot recreate what was lost. What was squandered. What never was. 

What can be is what you have now and he has her and she has been loyal and perhaps this is her reward and he is a benevolent god. She is. The rest is and always have been a fantasy wrought of malignant boredom. 

He obscures her peripheral view, arching his body over hers becoming all stimuli. 

He is all there is and all there will be. 

 

\---------------------------------------

 

The only escape for him is the rooftop where the cold leeches him of the heat signature of his transgression. 

Emptied of his human feelings, he allows himself to think about the last day. 

The last day, Light sees the facade falter: hatred, anger and resignation warring in his beloved nemesis. A system malfunction.

The flatness of his eyes, such a lovely landscape of rage. Not the common impotence but ever cold burning, that of a barely leashed god-figure crashing into a mountain, still lunging for a last minute vengeance. The sterile tension in his limbs and the unrelenting lust that is driving them both insane. They operate on the basis of that ancient code of guaranteed revenge. Light won the last round. L fully expects his own turn which fully amuses Light in the way children must amuse their parents.

His defeat, Light thinks, will taste so fucking sweet.

“I can hear you salivating,” L says, not turning around and Light laughs airily. Everyone else exchanges looks that once again carry doubt of L’s sanity.

“Ryuuzaki?” Light asks, attempting to infuse his voice with worry but even for him it might not be possible. There is actual enraged anguish underneath the brittle perfection of L’s skin. Heknowsheknowsheknowsheknows choruses in Light’s mind. And he can do nothing but wait. Light is half-hard in his trousers. 

The task force looks to him and he cannot allow them to know the glee inside of him. He clears his throat uncertainly. 

“Ryuuzaki, a word?” 

L turns, the dumb tilt of his head no longer fluid but stiff as if to stave off shuddering. Enraged. So enraged. He’s never looked more animated or beautiful. 

“Anything you have to say can be freely discussed in front of our illustrious colleagues.” 

Not really, but Light takes a breath and attempts to force a rush of blood to his face. 

“I’m worried about you.”

Gaze unfocused, L lifts his tea cup to his mouth, takes a long, loud sip, punctuates it with an even louder and more incongruous ‘AH’, containing no relief or human intonation whatsoever. 

“That’s heartwarming. Really, it is.” 

The disrespect emanates from every pore. If Light were less sure, he’d pull L out of his seat and stomp on his nose. But he recognizes that this is a child who knows he’s lost. He’s acting out. The final hammer will come down soon enough. Let him kick his feet and scream. It only adds to his upper hand. 

He raises his eyes to meet his father’s behind the tuft of L’s greasy rat’s nest. As clueless as he can sometimes be, Souichirou understands body language and also trusts his son’s judgment. 

L rolls his eyes as the other detectives clear the room without further comment. 

“If you are attempting to eliminate all possible eyewitnesses, I’ll remind you that there are cameras in this room as well.” 

“Knock it off. You’re acting like a spiteful child.” 

L stares. 

“Spiteful.” His voice reverberates hollow as if corroded with rust. His hands are steady as he lifts a teaspoon to examine it, an extraneous gesture used to only to marshall control. Parroting back the accusation in turn designed to test Light’s concerned friend/lover routine. They’ve done this so many times but never with such a delicious backdrop of finality, 

“L did you know, death gods love apples,” L rasps, after a moment. “The insipid grade school symbolism will get you life in prison at the very least.” 

Light’s anger flares before he can push it down and he hates himself because it’s all the detective can do: taunt him with his unsubstantiated suspicions in a last ditch attempt to provoke a fatal error. A misstep. Light understands the compulsion. He’s watching a man’s body twitch after he’s been beheaded. Still, before he can rein in his temper, he has L by his collar. 

There is no self-satisfaction. L’s face gives nothing away. 

“You need your rest.” He doesn’t mean sleep. His hand brushes the taper of L’s jawline. Why not, he thinks. It is the last time, might as well give the son of a bitch a proper send off. A final act of charity. A last rite for the depraved sort. 

The audacity of his offer traps L’s expression between disgust and bitter amusement. Disgust wins out, eventually. He shrugs out of Light’s grip, or tries to. 

There is no jest, no playfulness in the aversive curl of L’s body. Light can feel the tightness of carefully corded muscle in his shoulders and back. The instinct to run away not out of fear (though there is fear, L is not afraid of him precisely, he’s afraid of the paradigm shift to come where L is a dashed idol and not even the full fury of his instinct can save him from this ending. All the other victories are worthless if L can’t have this one) but a palpable loathing. 

L’s gaze is direct. Unflinching and the need for the actual words is eliminated but L isn’t one to waste an opportunity for cruelty.

“Do not insult me by presuming that I share your need for self-delusion.” 

Light bites the inside of his lips, gripping the fabric of L’s shirt tighter. Blood fills his mouth but stability, even that from pain is beyond him now. L makes no movement to get away, leans in close in an approximation of an old intimacy now as manufactured as a film. 

“If we are going to do this, you will confront me as you are.”

“And that is?” Light raises his chin, ready to receive the blow. Needing it. 

“I could never do the full horror of you justice by reducing it to a simple word.” 

Light couldn’t stop the grin spreading on his face even as his stomach filled with unease. There was a coldness beneath L’s blatant resentment. A clarity that had been seemingly lost beneath the childish feet stamping.

“That’s very flattering thank you.” 

L doesn’t seem to hear Light’s gloating. He is only the cool sharpness of his eyes and Light’s smile fades under the steely determination in it. Still? Even now? But it’s not a shock, L will never go gently and Light knows this like he knows the color of the sky. It’s why he’s been such an incredible adversary. Light’s skin prickles with warning.

In a show of strength that is always baffling when it came from such a fragile seeming entity, L extricates himself from Light’s grip, curves his long spindly fingers around the base of Light’s throat and presses. 

“Just know that everything you’ve done, all the sacrifices you’ve made will change nothing. You gambled everything on a lie believing it would save you in the end but the world will turn and humans are what they are, you won’t live forever so whatever it is that you are doing is not sustainable.” L’s thumb caresses the curve of Light’s neck and he shudders, words and touch like individual shards of glass into his flesh. Twisting the shards, L’s soften slightly into poison pity and he murmurs: “You’re just a boy.” 

He walks away from Light who remains frozen in curved lights of flickering screen.

Light underestimated the damage the direct hit did to his insides, bandaged the wound, ignored hemorrhaging viscera and maybe that’s why he’s been winded ever since, pain spreading from the blood pooling inside. 

He’s been dying since then, slowly, his life sluggishly leaving him even as the memory remained redacted. 

Up on this roof, Light saw him mourn himself and he was still solid beneath the weight of his grief, regret?

“Have you ever told the truth?” 

Did you hear what I said? Do you understand? 

Light assumed that he wanted Light broken, affected by his accusations, so-called wisdom and Light refused to give him anything. He play acted the version of himself that was lost, had been lost from the moment he found the Death Note. L only knew the echo of him. The hologram. 

But as he gave L his answer on the deathbed, it became clear that it was more than just the petty victory. L had moved beyond that. 

It was about something closer to redemption. 

A last attempt to reach out to someone who for all intents, has accepted their demise. 

Light sits on the same rooftop, the external glaze of the city lights a claustrophobic blur. Inside is the poison, the mirrored versions of his former selves unable to replace the parts of him sick with the rot of indecision. Comfort and reason elude him. He shakes unconsciously from the cold. 

Did I do the right thing is this real did I do the right thing you doubt me I doubt myself

I doubt myself.

I doubt myself

 

\--------------------------------------

 

A shower, a drug-induced nap, a foray into paperwork, several logistical conversations with his subordinates, provide only the basic veneer of humanity. L ruins that entirely by whispering into his ear: 

“I hope you gave Misa my regards?”

The clatter of Light’s keyboard smashing into a monitor causes about as much of a disruption as one would expect. Mogi and Aizawa share a look as if to say ‘why did we bother to come in on the weekend again?’ Matsuda mother-hens Light into the break room for tea and quiet. Thankfully, reads the murderous warning in Light’s eyes as a sign to leave him be. 

Light rests his face against the coolness of the stainless steel refrigerator door. L watches from the table, noises of movement inconsistent, most of his ectoplasmic energy probably concentrated in the unnerving force of his stare. Light wants to hit him, pick a fight about Misa, force the childish taunts but the exhaustion has him perilously close to collapse. What’s the point in taunting a ghost? It only hurts him to think about how pathetic he’s been, especially last night. 

“Can I ask you something,” Light asks, carelessly placing his cold tea on the counter and turning to face him. 

“I am at your disposal.” Not snide, actually rather sincere. Light is too tired to fill with hate.

“Were you ever conflicted? About anything?” His voice is a hushed prompting, hesitant. 

L settles back against his chair, tapping the rim of his thumbnail against his teeth in contemplation.

“Yes, but I learned to deal with it I suppose. Hesitation results if you indulge it, and that breeds inaction which in turn erodes your agency. It makes you weak. It makes you -”

“A woman?” 

L snickers.

“I was going to say ineffectual actually.”

“Same thing.”

“Your misogyny is not cute, Light-kun.” 

Light snorts. Raises his eyebrows to accuse hypocrisy but shakes it out of his head. He won’t get side-tracked. His insides burn and it’s the sort of conflagration that will consume all regardless of what he does. Determination is his greatest trait but it will not allow him to back away at the most inconvenient times. 

“What if it was the choice between your instincts and your logic?” 

L folds up noiselessly, resting his head contemplative against the denim perch of his knees. The air shifts. L’s moods are external now instead of carefully closed up in the flesh container of his mind, constrained to only guessing, Light’s unnatural ability to read something that’s usually locked away from him. But then, the only one who will feel the consequences is Light. 

“Melding instincts and logic was how I lived my life,” he says. “I believe the dichotomy you’re referring to is emotion versus logic.” L smiles at Light’s sour look. “You still hate when I imply that you are or can be emotional.” 

“I’m as logical as you are.”

“You have the capacity yes. But we’re discussing something specifically, are we not? Your doubt.” 

Light thinks about smashing his fist into something but the closest thing, the marble countertop he’s leaning against, will most likely result in a broken hand and while the violence/pain would satisfy the self-destructive rearing inside his chest for the moment, it would be hellish to explain it to the more alert members of the investigation team. L waits patiently for him to swallow it all down. 

“What’s the fucking point of saying anything out loud if you can read my mind?”

“Realism,” L supplies. He’s enjoying this, obviously, but there’s a soft look in his eyes that soothes Light, partially. 

He sighs, scrubs his hands over his face in a vain attempt to keep the tiredness from his features. 

“Did you ever doubt what you were doing,” Light asks, emphatic and careful on every word. “Why you were doing it?”

“You weren’t who I thought you were.” 

“What?”

“You weren’t who I thought you were,” L repeats, his voice louder, more firm the second time. It’s beyond an idle observation. It scrambles Light’s insides because out of whatever half-serious, confusing bullshit he assumed L would say, it wasn’t that.

“No,” Light says, like shutting a door, dropping a boulder through a rotting wooden floor before the enemy on the other side can try and take him. “you never lost sight of what I really was. You’re not stupid. You may have wanted me more than you cared about reason but you never lied to yourself.”

L shakes his head. He moves noiselessly, ratcheting the unnatural fetidness of the room. As if there molecules other than the components of air now. 

“When I took the case, I thought of you, of Kira as a sort of one dimensional boy king looking to secure his legacy or some such bollocks. And for awhile, it seemed I was right.” 

Light stares at the after image.

“And so then what? You saw the good in me?” He laughs through it, it’s so ridiculous but L remains calm and dispassionate. 

“So to speak. I didn’t realize it until much later but you had changed somehow. I went over and over it in my mind and I can trace it back to the moment in confinement when you said ‘I have no use for this pride. I have to get rid of it.’ And your eyes changed. Suddenly you were someone else.”

Himself, before. Terrified and confused. He remembers it like it happened to someone else because in the moment there was no reason for his circumstances, none of the stability and patience that would come with knowledge of the overarching game. The only certainty in him came from the feeling of wrongness. And fear. 

“At first, I thought you had some sort of dissociative disorder,” L continued, thoughtfully. “but you remained as you were throughout our time together. Genuinely convincing for the first time in your role as beloved Japanese honor student and son. There were moments when I found myself…respecting you, liking you, wanting you. It was frightening.” 

Hence how swiftly L would lash out in his cruel, calculating ways, darting for a misstep to absolve himself of the feeling of complacency, of falling head long into sentiment instead of the straight and narrow of logic, yes Light knew it all but it was another thing to hear it infused with more emotion and regret than anything that could have occurred before. 

“I asked myself, who is the real Light? Who am I fighting against? Who is the boy I want in the execution chair?” L sighs minutely through his nostrils. “I thought about telling you this before. Of appealing to you as you might have been.”

“Why didn’t you? Before.” Before the end game, the last grasping moment where L had barricaded himself away from him but for a brief moment that gauges at him still. 

L shakes his head. 

“You were already gone.” Casualty of the disconnect between intellect and empathy, particularly his own. 

The emotion that claws it’s way out of him is not one straightforward expression of anger or despair but a mixture of every hopeless rusted metal shrapnel feeling he has been unable to process and quantify. Just a year ago, he might have cried, but now the impulse is there but the mechanism fails. 

“What use is this? You’re gone.” Emphasis is torn out of him as if with claws. “I can’t touch you, I can’t fuck you. You’re dead. There is no point to you being here. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry?” He laughs, loud. It bounces off the walls, emptiness and continues in the background long after he’s finished speaking. “Even if I were, which I am not, I would never say the words. I’d rather die than give you the satisfaction. But guess what? I am not sorry. I clawed my way to this. and THIS, you gone, is all I’ve ever wanted. The way is clear now. There is no one else who will stop me from changing the world. It’s only a matter of time now before Kira is doctrine.”

He paces the length of the room, uncaring if anyone has heard him. It doesn’t matter. Other eyes don’t and have never mattered. This is between himself and whatever the fuck is in the room with him now. 

“This is a waste of time,” Light’s voice is hoarse and low. The majority of emphasis, he hopes is in his gaze. “I don’t regret it. Any of it.”

L is stonelike and Light thinks, finally, I’ve shut him up. I can rest but he continues because he can’t stop himself, the sentimentality came up with the anger, it compells him to expel one last rationalization. If he says it out loud, it must, it must it must be true.

“When we met, it was already too late, you were who you were and I had made my choices. It’s…foolish to look back. I can’t change any of it. I’m not sure I want to.” He stops, the fatigue weighing his limbs down so suddenly, his heart races and he fears that he will die right there. 

From the growing absence in L’s omniscient gaze, his fears of death are substantiated. 

It’s over, Light can feel it. 

Relief. 

Loss. 

“You have decided?”

Light turns away from him, hardening, withdrawing.

“Never had much of a choice, did I?”

The rebuttal never comes. He’s gone and it’s a hard reset, all the strain dissipating as if it all happened to someone else, someone weaker, fractured. 

The world is overfull of meaning in these moments of mania. Everything seems like a threat and there’s no where he can turn. His only possible resource and recourse is in himself.

At the end of the week, he reunites with his physical body. Feeling returns and his eyes are bloodshot but focused, cold, finally in the mirror.

The fever has abated.

\-------------------------------------------

They all stand on the sidewalk, watching the movers load the trucks, huddled together in practical warmth-seeking. Light hunches into his coat. Nostalgia, the sentimental drivel inside bays at him that it’s the end of an era.

“It’s the end of an era,” Matsuda says sadly, with a small nod, an attempt at solemnity he fails at usually. The others make appropriately sad noises. Light staring up at the colossal monolith, egotistically grandiose and now hulking in its emptiness. Signifier of a ransacked idol, downgraded to nothing but a mixed up memory, no fondness felt, merely a confused sense of loyalty, easily transferable to the next willing leader available. 

“And the dawn of a new one A better one.” Light says, determined. The quality of his voice, sonorous, strong draws their eyes to him. He can feel his father’s relief and pride like another structure, spatially adjacent. Their spines straighten and once again, the world seems to have meaning, hope. They do not sense the emptiness inside him, the colder version of Light that wears his face, carries on with a single-mindedness that will ultimately decide that they are expendable.

He’s pulled himself in their eyes, struggled through to become a better man, a hero. 

The reality of it is that he’s allowed the parts of himself that have been screaming in grief to die finally. For the greater good. 

\---------

_There was no price I was willing to pay. I made a mistake._

_The only mistake I have ever made out of pride, hubris and I had to do something. I had to build something over my own grave. A temple over the scraps remaining._

_I did not sell my soul. It was gone before I could feel it._

 

He writes this on a piece of paper and burns it. It’s what he’s always done with the thoughts and emotions that eat away at his insides. He can’t keep them in, but he can’t let them out where anyone can see. He writes it down, writes it all down, tips them into his lighter. 

They stream away from him in smoke. Ryuk laughs and laughs at him.

Up the staircase.

Blue skies ahead.


End file.
